Hey all, my novel is one long document. Is there a way I can see how far into the novel I am, such as what word count the cursor is on?
I’m asking as I check details and want certain details to precede other details. But without page numbers it’s seemingly impossible to verify. Is there a way to do this? thx
When your novel is one long document, you’re not using Scrivener up to its potential. You could break up the Novel in Chapters and Scenes using the option in the Document menu.
After that, it’s easy to move Scenes around and update the structure of your novel.
When you select a part of your scene, the Footer will show the amount of words in the selection.
HTH
I know all this but I imported an entire doc from Word. So I didn’t start it that way. And, it does not have chapters. So still looking for the answer.
Then for such a large single file you might be better off going back to using Word.
No because I like scrivener more and 100k docs on word lag too much.
View → Text Editing → Show Page View will give you the current page and total page count in the footer: Page 15 of 40, or whatever.
As noted, though, using a single long document effectively disables most of the reasons to use Scrivener in the first place. You can use the Documents → Split command to split it up.
Thank you! I did that and was looking ‘on the document’ for the page numbers. Now I see it’s on the taskbar below. Cha! lol. Much appreciated.
Ctrl+Shift+Home will select everything from your cursor position to the start of the document, and the selection word count will then show in the footer. RightArrow will then clear the selection and return the cursor to the original position.
That said, I agree with the other recommendations here to begin splitting the document into sections as you’re working—unless you’re at the point of compiling to Word to finish things off there anyway, splitting in Scrivener will benefit you by helping show some meaningful structure of the document in the binder (and it needn’t be chapter, scene—you could break it up into any outline arrangement that helps you see the flow of your piece). Each section then has its own notes and synopsis area, making it easy to leave yourself more contextually relevant notes on the details, easier to find quickly than with a lot of scrolling. Overall the work becomes easier to navigate this way. And with the Scrivenings mode you can still see all your document text together in the editor (and all the documents comments together in the inspector) when you want.
The one caveat I would mention is that the text selection trick above won’t work across multiple documents on Windows; it will only give you the word count of the selection within the current split document. (You can see the word count of the whole group of documents in the footer; this is just a limitation on the selection.) But you can use the word count column in the outliner to see the size of your split documents, which can give you a good idea of position, word-count wise, and for me the trade off in favor of actually seeing the outline structure of the novel is well worth it.