I wrote my first novel in Word, my second in Scrivener, but as one long document. The third I’m also writing in Scrivener, but this time I’m using a separate document for each chapter, and compiling them into one book at the end. So far, it seems to be working well - every few days I compile the book in its current state, and go over the Word document. OK, my questions:
In my last book, Scrivener let me insert new chapter headings with a little line of code. Is there something similar that allows me to automate inserting the chapter headings at the beginning of each chapter/document as it’s being compiled into Word?
In Full Page view, is there any way for me to continue smoothly on into the next chapter/document in the sequence, or do I always have to quit out of Full Screen, look for the next chapter in the binder, select that and switch back to full screen?
As to the second question: You can absolutely do what you want. Fullscreen reflects whatever is showing in the Editor view when you head into fullscreen mode. And you can bring temporarily together as much of your novel as you like into the Editor view by using the Edit Scrivenings function.
So, select some documents in the Binder. Hit Edit Scrivenings. All those docs appear temporarily strung together in the Editor view. Go into Fullscreen.
–Greg
P.S. If you are not versed in the Edit Scrivenings mode, you are going to love it. For example, if you click on a folder in the Binder and then hit Edit Scrivenings, the Editor will fill continuously with any documents in that folder. If you select a range of documents in the Binder and hit Edit Scrivenings, then all those documents will appear together in the Editor view. The documents are still individual things, but you are able to see and edit them together. Clicking on something else in the Binder ends the Edit Scrivenings mode.
For question 2, you can also use the View>Editor>Go To option to navigate to another document or you can select a group of documents with cmd-click before entering the Full Screen session, then use the back and forward shortcut keys (cmd+[ and cmd+] respectively) to switch among them.
As for the first question, you can choose to include document/folder titles when you compile, so if for instance you have a folder entitled “Chapter 1” and then within that all the documents of scenes for the chapter, when you compile you can choose to include the actual “Chapter 1” folder and select to have titles included for folders. Then your exported document will include “Chapter 1” as a sort of section heading. It wouldn’t be an actual header, thought, ie what would show up at the top of every page, so you might be talking about something else. Just thought I’d mention this though, in case.
So if I edit while using the Edit Scrivenings mode, when I exit it, all of my edits will still exist in the individual chapters? (I’m using one folder for the entire book, with each document a different chapter, and then additional folders for research and character notes and whatnot.)
Thanks, v. helpful.
And, MimeticMouton, the problem is that each document in the folder is a new chapter, so I don’t think that’ll work.
It seems like it’d be a piece of cake to insert “new chapter” code at the appropriate places while in the Edit Scrivenings mode!
It would … since in Scrivener, internally, there is no difference between a real folder and a document, a folder can hold text of it’s own. So all you need to do is select the folder for each chapter, click in the document area which will be blank at that point, and type in the chapter designation that you wish. You will see that the binder icon changes to have a little page attached — that shows that the folder itself contains text. Now when you select that folder and any others in an edit scrivenings session, the chapter designations will appear at the appropriate point to show you are entering the new chapter.
Mark
Mark beat me to it, but what I was going to say is that you can always select in the compile settings to have the title for each document show, too–it isn’t limited to folders. So same as before, if you have a document entitled “chapter 1,” the next as “chapter 2,” etc. you can just select to include titles for documents and voila, the “chapter 1” title will be inserted at the top of each document in the appropriate place to designate your chapters. (Note that this is for the compiled export only; it won’t show up in Edit Scrivenings or in the Editor window except in the title bar.)
But MM, is there a way to have Scrivener choose the chapter numbering, or do I have to do it myself? I mean, now I have to title each chapter, like, “Chapter 7”, “Chapter 8” and whatnot, rather than “Chapter X” and let Scrivener figure out which chapter is which once I’ve reshuffled the chapter order?
Ahhh, but yes. I see probably what you were asking back in the beginning. Sorry for being slow.
Auto-numbering (Edit>Insert>Auto-Numbering) will insert the code for the numeral system you select so that on export, Scrivener will replace the code with the correct sequential numeral. You can look in Scrivener Help>Menu>The Edit Menu for more on the auto numbering codes so you can just type them in yourself.
Doing that, you can choose to actually include that in the text of the file itself, e.g. you start your document with “Chapter <$n>, In which blah blah blah happens” or something. You could alternately choose to use the code in the title of the file, so the binder would be filled with a lot of “Chapter <$n>” files (which would probably not be terribly helpful to you). Or what you could choose to do, since you’ve used a single file per chapter, is to set up the scene breaks in the compile menu (under Text Options) to use “Chapter <$n>” as the separating text between non-folder files (so, essentially, between all your chapters), but if you have it set to include a page break between those instead, that won’t work. And again, any of this is going to work on compile, not while you’re working in Scrivener, so you won’t see your numbers until you export.
