I am a long time devoted user of Scrivener, and SOMETIMES of Scapple. What I particularly love is that when I get stuck on the structure of a project, I can drag the entire binder into Scapple and start pushing the structure around. This elegant and simple tool was broken for me at some point (I think with a release of Scrivener 3.0) after which documents imported into Scapple with both TITLE and SYNOPSIS. In the absence of a synopsis, the document title was repeated as the content of the synopsis.
Apart from the fact that my nice Scapple map suddenly became very cluttered, it was also the case that I was seeing double for almost every note! My workaround was to save my projects in the OLD version of Scrivener whenever I wanted to export them into Scapple. But that’s a lot of work, and eventually I just stopped using Scapple.
Fast forward: years later, in the middle of a very difficult project, I think-- “maybe there is a new version of Scapple…?” I download the beta, drag my binder into Scapple, and-- NO DOUBLE TITLES!!! I then of course open the release version of Scapple and discover it works this way in the current release as well.
I’m not sure when this feature/bug was fixed, but I am so thrilled that I had to share my thanks to everyone at L&L (and also beg you to never go back to that other way again ). My life is hugely improved!!!
Thanks for the kind words! I’m glad to hear things are back to working better for you again, particularly for this approach as I’ve always liked being able to do that as well with a Scrivener outline: just dump it into Scapple and start pushing things around into topic groups. That freedom to ignore where they came from can be very valuable in finding overlapping topics that should be cleaned up into one, or blind-spots where I’m maybe skipping over a crucial concept.
It is I suppose the structural equivalent to the old trick of exporting your text to a very different medium, like ePub or PDF, so that you can more easily spot the many embarrassing typos that you’ve stopped “seeing” in the original.
You’ll find the documentation on it in the Scapple user manual, under §9.5, Integration with Scrivener, but it should be pretty straight-forward and just like you guessed: select some stuff in the binder, drag it over and drop into a clean area of an open Scapple board.
Thanks! My error was not opening the folder and selecting the items within it; I had only dragged the Manuscript (or Notes) folder over and just the word “Manuscript” or “Notes” wound up there.
Ah! Yeah that makes sense. It does require a precise selection of what you want, rather than assuming you’ll want everything below a certain level. It makes it easier to control as sometimes you might only want the top level folders rather than all of the little pieces within them that describe the gory details of the chapter.
). My life is hugely improved!!!
