Hi all. This isn’t the first time a similar question was asked—I searched—but I never found a simple answer. There’ a lot of technical discussions and reference to sections of the help files which don’t really answer the question.
I want the filenames in the binder to take the name of the headers in each file (which also happen to be the first lines of text). That really makes (or would make) reorganizing and naming sections of the book really easy. I only work in “scrivenings” mode.
When I first imported the 70,000-word Word document, naming and hierarchical structure was done automatically based on heading levels in Word and was almost all correct (only required a few manual adjustments). But now I don’t know how to manage this and with new or edited content; headings (or first line of text in a file) and file names don’t match and are sometimes in grey italics.
Here’s my straightforward setup. In the manuscript, everything has a style heading, either Heading 1, Heading 2, or Heading 3. The hierarchical structure in the binder under “Manuscript” is very simple and match the headings. Top-level section files are level 1. Indented under those are Header 2 sections and their intro text, and indented under that are all the Heading 3 sections and text.
Couldn’t be simpler. Here’s what it looks like:
Top-level chapter (Heading 1)
Second level section (Heading 2)
Third-level subsection (Heading 3)
Third-level subsection (Heading 3)
Another second level (Heading 2)
Etc.
But now adding new content or changing the headings results in a mismatch between content and filename and in appearance (sometimes grey italics). Not convenient when reorganizing and renaming sections. Can’t the file names be automatically renamed when we change a heading in the content? I don’t want to manually rename each file every time I change a section name in the text (or vice-versa).
Please don’t ask about what output I want or suggest I can fix that when exporting or compiling; I’m not there yet. I’m currently just writing and reorganizing. Scrivener isn’t just a tool to export or compile manuscripts to different formats; it’s to write, edit and organize, and I’m trying to make that easier.
The answer is intrinsically the opposite of your proposed approach.
Name in the Binder and use place holders in Compile Format Designer to identify the correct Chapter, Section and Sub-sections and draw in the heading name from the Binder name, since it’s one per document.
@Kevitec57’s approach is one common way of handling headings in Scrivener, and if you choose that route you can still see the headings (now binder titles) in the editor by enabling View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Titles in Scrivenings. The Appearance pane in Scrivener ▸ Settings (or Preferences, depending on your OS version) gives you a lot of control over how the titles will look, including the option for the title’s font size to adjust based on its level in the outline hierarchy, which could give you a visual indicator of the Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.
For this approach, you could use Documents ▸ Auto-Fill ▸ Set Selected Text as Title. You’ll have to do this for each document individually, but you can use shortcuts to speed up the process. I’d start at the top of the binder, select the first document you want to change, then select the heading text in the editor, use ⌥⇧⌘T (Set Selected Text as Title), forward-delete to remove the text and empty line in the editor, and ⌥⌘↓ to load the next document while keeping focus in the editor.
You can however go entirely the opposite direction, and leave the files untitled in the binder so that the first line of text in the editor will show there instead. This will show as grey italic, so it sounds like some of your documents are this way already. This text is dynamic, so if you change the initial text in the editor, the text in the binder will change as well.
For this, you’ll just want to delete the title text of all the documents in question, which you can do quickly by Shift- or Cmd-clicking them in the binder and then using Documents ▸ Auto-Fill ▸ Clear Title.
In either case, I’d suggest making a backup first, so that if you don’t like the results or want to try the other way around to see how it looks, you can restore from that.
While that scheme appears to work for a well-structured project that isn’t the case for those projects that are more free-form (which includes 90% of my own). I move things around in the Binder to create better narrative flow and indeed use Collections to prototype alternative ones. For me, as someone who uses Scrivenings mode often, the structure in the Binder is what guides me by using folders (at both the chapter and subchapter level). I may promote/demote a document or folder, move it up and down in the order. Renaming the files whenever that happens would really screw with my mind.
As to the underlying filenames those are deliberately inscrutable to prevent people from fiddling with and thereby destroying the Project’s internal links.
Thank you, that is a detailed response with all the MacOS shortcuts, fantastic, much appreciated. If I’m correct, this is the same method as suggested by Kevitec57, which is against based on the compiler, but you set it to see some fields while editing in scrivenings. More complicated than I’d wish, and not sure this is what I need yet, I’ve only looked at you methods a few minutes. But will try, and will report back.
Same here, I am using the binder to arrange sections, it’s a big reorganization exercise of this 70,000-word book. The overview of titles in the binder also help rename sections to fit the new structure and flow. I also use the indentation to understand visually the text levels. But I don’t want to type these twice, one in the title, one in the text.
Now another thing I’ll have to figure out is to make heading formats (Heading 1, 2, 3) match the hierarchical level in the binder. Like if I take a level 2 text, indent it to level 3, make the header 2 automatically change to level 3 in screenings edit mode. I suppose to method suggested above will do that since it shows the text dynamically in the edit window. I’d prefer typing the text in scrivenings first, then the file name changes in the binder.
Not sure what you mean about fiddling around with internal file names and links, that wasn’t suggested anywhere and I wouldn’t think a second to hack my way into doing what I want.
The second method I described of leaving the titles empty so that the initial text of the document will appear in the binder would handle it your preferred way—type in the editor and it shows in the binder. But there’s no way to have the hierarchical placement of the item in the binder automatically change the style or HTML header level you have applied to the text, if that’s what you mean. That’s a good example of the sort of compile-related advantage titling the documents in the binder gives, since that does give the flexibility of formatting the title—at compile time—on the hierarchical placement. But other than the automatic size adjustment of Scrivenings titles (which is just an editor aesthetic; it doesn’t affect compile) you don’t then get the title styled directly in the editor or automatically updated in the binder if you change the text.
You’re not stuck with one or the other though. Maybe it would work best for you to begin with no binder titles, so that you’re just using the text in the editor and seeing that dynamically reflected in the binder, and then when the structure is more settled and you’re nearer compile, that’s the time to go through and set the binder titles from the initial text and clear the headings from the documents so that from that point they’re all handled as binder titles, giving you the most control when you come to compile.
Wow this is extremely helpful, and I’m sure not for me but for the many people searching who only found previous technical answers from years back. I’m not sure I caught two different methods in your previous response, but I think I do now.
In any case, I’ll just keep it simple for now to focus on writing, because I need to finish this (it’s years late). I’ll spend more time with the formatting later.
But this brings me to a related but somewhat different question, not sure it’s worth making a new threads, but in some threads, and sample documents, I’ve seen the structure being very different than the one I’m having. I had the section titles inside the text. That’s the influence from Microsoft Word. But the examples I’ve seen make headers (titles) as a separate file. I understand now the advantage of this; on compile (other word for export?) you can not only give a visual treatment for all but you can decide what is outputted. So if I just want to export of list of chapter and subchapter titles, or just chapter titles and the text at that level (and not all text), it can be done easily in the compiler.
But doesn’t that make the binder very long and difficult to look at and manage? How are you handling that? Also, if you change a file’s indentation in the binder hierarchy will the style type change automatically to that level?
You can expand/collapse the Binder display as needed. You can also use the Binder in parallel with an Outline view to show two different views of the overall outline. (I routinely work this way, with the Editor pane tied to either the Binder or the Outliner as needed.)
If you’ve assigned Section Types to be “structure-based,” they will change as a file’s location in the hierarchy changes. If you’ve assigned them manually, they won’t.
Thanks, that’s helpful as well. I feel the expand/collapse is a lot of work if you have like 50 subsections like I do, but the outliner sounds like it could be helpful, will take a look.
Now I think I understand the structure-based section type. I’ll switch to that.
Thanks again!
FWIW, the Draft folder of my WIP has 427 subdocuments across all levels. Mostly, I only show the “Chapter” folders (48 of them) in the Binder, which in my case are mostly auto-named based on their Synopses. I usually only expand the individual chapters that I’m currently working on.
There are certainly reasons someone might want to make a title as a separate file—a common one is what I believe @kewms is describing, where you might have a folder with a chapter name and then multiple untitled scenes as subdocuments within it. You might then tend to keep chapters you’re not currently working with collapsed and the ones you are expanded, and there are various shortcuts or modifier keys to help simplify that. In that case, the folders can keep the binder easier to manage than just a flat list of documents by providing a grouping structure, allowing you to hide lower-level items to just get the chapter overview without the scene breakdown, etc.
But it’s not necessary to do that to compile titles the way you’re describing. A structure such as you gave in the first post would allow all the items to collapse into the top level chapter document in the binder whether or not that document also contained text of its own. So to that extent, you already have that aspect of the binder management available to you. And if you want to just compile titles without text, that’s a simple matter of telling the compiler “Include the document titles but don’t include the text”. The key thing is that the title exists as a title, rather than just a heading in the document. There’s a lot you can do with that, but as a quick example you could try compiling to PDF the Tutorial (or your own project, if it does have binder titles) using the “Enumerated Outline” compile format.
This example also illustrates the power of having Section Layouts be distinct from Section Types. You can use the Enumerated Outline and Manuscript formats to get, respectively, an outline and a complete manuscript without making any changes at all to the underlying project.
Not at all. You expand and collapse according to structural divisions using clicking on the hierarchical chevron (>) or Alt+Click to open everything in the current sub-folder or Alt+[ to close everything to the root folders or Alt+] to open all structure including substructures.
I presume on Mac, you’d use Option instead of Alt in the same way.
Thanks to everyone who provided a response. This is a great community! These answers provide much clearer instructions on a few options than previous posts I found with similar a similar question. It will be very useful.
I won’t immediately provide feedback now on what I tried. It’s a lot to take in, and for now I’ll just continue writing the text letting Scrinever name the files based on the first line of text (which are headers I style). I’ll keep the advanced methods discussed here involving the compiler for later when it comes time to think about exporting.
The key thing is that the title exists as a title, rather than just a heading in the document. There’s a lot you can do with that, but as a quick example you could try compiling to PDF the Tutorial (or your own project, if it does have binder titles) using the “Enumerated Outline” compile format.