Firstly, I love the new Adaptive Naming feature (Mac Scrivener manual section 7.3). It works great for my free-wheeling style of drafting.
Until, that is, I fire up Aeon Timeline (AT). AT doesn’t deal well with 70 untitled documents with empty synopses. Which is of course AT’s problem, and I do intend to drop a word in their forum as well.
Nonetheless, I can help AT along with synopses quickly by selecting Documents > Auto-Fill > Set Synopses From Main Text.
I would like to be able to do the same for titles. If I have multiple documents selected, I’d like the option to Documents > Auto-Fill > Set Titles From Main Text.
In the same vein, I’d like to be able to clear synopses as easily as I can clear titles. So a menu item like Documents > Auto-Fill > Clear Synopses would be a boon.
This would give me a quick round-trip: select my untitled documents, quickly give them titles and synopses, go to AT, record/fix structure and set/fix dates. Then back to Scrivener to strip those titles and synopses and let Adaptive Naming do its magic again.
No plans for this one, I’m afraid. However, Matt is aware of the issue in Aeon Timeline and I believe he has plans to fix the way it currently doesn’t work well with Scrivener’s adaptive naming.
You could use project replace, limited to titles or synopses, to quickly add or remove text from the documents, but I don’t know if setting the text this way will serve the purpose, since they’d all be the same. You can use RegEx replacements to set titles/synopses only for empty documents by searching for “^$”, and to clear the text you could either just search for the specific text you set and replace it with nothing (thereby only clearing titles/synopses from the documents that originally didn’t have one anyway, assuming you use a unique title/synopsis) or just hand-select the documents that need to be cleared and replace any text (".") with nothing for only the selected documents.
Regarding clearing synopses: your suggestion almost works… I find I have to follow up replacing regular expression “.” with nothing, by replacing regex “\n” with nothing; then I’m back to truly empty synopses and adaptive synopsis filling. It’s two steps rather than one (there may be a way to do it in one step, but my regex skills are rusty; I can’t find it if there is one. ) but that beats heck out of clearing synopses for tens of documents one at a time.
Regarding adding titles: Yeah, setting text as you suggest doesn’t really serve the purpose, as I’d really like to set the titles from the text as one can with synopses, so that when I get over to the Aeon Timeline (AT) side I can tell one event from another at a glance.
But, I did hear back from Matt at AT that he’ll be taking a look at setting titles on HIS side from the synopses, so hope is not lost for my primary use case for this If he succeeds, that would leave me with:
In Scrivener, select the docs with empty synopses and titles, and use Documents > Auto-Fill > Set Synopses From Main Text
Let AT fill in titles on its side from the synopses I just filled, and do what I’m doing there
Back in Scrivener, those files should still be selected in the Binder (or I could have made a collection from them), so clear synopses with the two-step process above and then clear titles.
Not too bad, especially considering that the way I work, I don’t have to do this very often (every two or three weeks, when I lose track of what’s happening when in my head, that’s all ).
For the synopses, you can search for .|\n to catch new lines. For the titles, the anchors only work in the project replace; you can use them in the “find” field and then replace the empty string with some text and it will affect only items with empty titles. It’s not possible to create a project search for documents with no title using that RegEx, however, because the project search on titles will also match the placeholder text. So ^$ will return an item that has an empty line in the title, i.e. a new line character alone on a line, but it won’t match the documents you’re interested in.
However, you could create a search collection for items with no title using the special * search to find items with any characters and then inverting the results. Then you can select the items to run whatever jobs you want on them.
) but that beats heck out of clearing synopses for tens of documents one at a time.