Multimarkdown metadata customization

Scrivener
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There isn’t a way of changing the metadata formatting that radically. That feature is hard-coded to produce either MultiMarkdown or Pandoc compatible metadata blocks.

There are two approaches you could take:

  • The easiest is going to be to copy and paste the metadata info into a binder item, and put that item at the top of the Draft folder. It would at that point just be another piece of text, and you can thus format it however you want. Naturally you would clear all metadata settings after doing so.

    • On the Mac you can select existing rows from the Metadata tables (either in the Format Designer or the project settings) and copy them whole. But otherwise compiling and then copying and pasting from the .md file will be easiest.
    • If you call this section “Metadata”, then Scrivener will treat it specially, leaving the text entirely alone. It also has special behaviours to insert the text into existing metadata fields generated by the compiler, but if you aren’t using any of them, that won’t matter.
    • If you write multiple short stories into one project, as folders in the main draft folder perhaps, the idea is then to put a metadata file at the top of each folder that you compile from.

  • The other approach is to use Section Layout’s prefix feature to create your own metadata block.[1]

    • Along with the metadata each item has available to it as placeholders, Custom metadata is going to be of use with this approach, where you might fill in the story’s metadata into the folder used to compile it, or maybe the first chunk of text, and have the Section Layout that it uses generate the metadata block.
    • A nice side-effect is that all such information can be added as columns to the Outliner. So you could manage your story metadata from a top level outliner view rather easily.
    • For another take on this same idea, check out this Quarto template. It is using a sequence of entries in the binder, one per metadata field, and a special section layout to print each field. That’s maybe overkill for what you’re looking to do, but for a system like Quarto with many dozens of metadata options, it’s a nice approach.

  1. There is a sample project demonstrating the technique, a bit further down in that thread. ↩︎

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