Linking two documents, one in outline and one in the manuscript

Scrivener
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You certainly can link outline items together, and quite usefully so. The tool you are looking for is Document Bookmarks.[1]

  1. You can get to the feature with the Navigate ▸ Inspect ▸ Bookmarks, which you will note has a shortcut, or with the mouse, clicking on the blue ‘i’ inspector button in the toolbar, and then the bookmark tab.
  2. Check the header bar, and if it says “Project Bookmarks” click it and switch to “Document Bookmarks”, or press Ctrl6 / ⌘6
  3. As the help text says in the top portion of the view… :slight_smile:

Once you’ve done that, you’ll note the most powerful part of this feature, in how the lower part of the sidebar is a full editor.

That all said, I am in complete agreement with the above. I would need a really strong reason to have two separate but nearly identical outlines in my binder. That sounds like a lot of unnecessary overhead. The great thing about Scrivener’s approach is that your outline and your text are one and the same. You describe the content of your text right on top of it, rather than having to use separate lists, views or even software, to manage and understand your text. Here is a post walking someone through how I outline in the user manual project, which touches on some practical techniques as well for easily flipping between outline and text views.

I definitely do use separate outlines, but when I do it is for very different purposes. For example, this post describes a way of tracking editing tasks. I link to that one specifically because it is also a good practical demonstration of the document bookmarks feature.

If your main concern about outlining in the draft itself is coming from how you’ve had to do things in word processors, then a good thing to know is that Scrivener’s compile system has been designed specifically to allow outlines to be more detailed, to maybe only partially represent, the heading structure your reader will see (chapter breaks, etc.). It is also entirely possible to have areas of the draft folder that don’t export at all, meaning you can keep notes and text right alongside each other rather than completely different areas of the binder. In Word, yeah, you have an outliner, but it is very strictly slaved to book structure, and you thus cannot use it to describe your text in a way that is meaningful to you, only in a way that is meaningful to the reader. Scrivener is the complete opposite.

  1. §10.3, Project and Document Bookmarks, in the user manual PDF. ↩︎

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