Odd copy/paste occuring when I'm not looking

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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1

Ever since Monterey v12.2, something strange has been happening:

My manuscripts have folders that contain sequences. Inside each sequence is a series of chapter folders, and inside each chapter folder is a series of documents. Pretty standard way to configure the binder if you have a novel written in sequences of chapters.

Seven or eight times now, about once a week, I will discover that one of my titles in a sequence folder has been replaced by the title of a document (!), and that document, while part of the manuscript, may not even be within that same sequence.

About the only way this could happen, logically speaking, would be an errant copy and paste. But I never have the need to copy a document title and paste it somewhere else, and certainly, I would never replace a sequence title with a document title.

But this happens completely behind my back, and I’m not at all happy about this.

This is happening randomly to four different manuscripts that I’m currently working on. I’m using an M1 MacBook Pro. One other thing that might be related to this is I’m using speech to text. But never in speech to text do I ever do a copy/paste.

So it’s very doubtful that this is something that I am doing inadvertently. And I have never seen the macOS ever inadvertently copy and paste something where it was not welcome, going all the way back to the first 128K Macintosh.

What’s really problematic about this is that the sequence titles are designed to appear in the compiled book and in the TOC. If they don’t have the proper names, that is a huge problem.

So what in the world could be going on here? Reboots do not fix it. So far, nothing has fixed it.

2

Are these actual titles, or autofilled titles? (Autofilled titles will be italicized in the Binder.)

Are the titles out of order, or the documents themselves? Put another way, are the documents mis-titled relative to their actual contents?

3

They are manually-typed titles. I’ve never used auto-fill for titles. None of the titles are out of order, at least not until a document title mysteriously replaces a sequence title without my knowledge, then it is out of order by definition, because it’s then in the wrong place.

Other than this changing of sequence titles to unwanted document titles, the documents are not ever out of order. The documents are not mistitled relative to their actual contents.

Maybe I should put that another way: nothing is ever out of order including the sequence position or document position in the binder. Nothing moves. The only thing that happens is magically, a sequence title spontaneously adopts a particular document title—the document title text replaces the sequence title text.

4

I don’t see how a copy/paste could do that … if I’m correctly deciphering your description of the symptoms.

5

It’s possible that you might be misinterpreting this.

This is exactly what a copy/paste does. If you select and copy something, place the cursor, and then paste, that copied text is duplicated at the point of cursor insertion.

If I were to copy the title of a document, select the title in a sequence folder, and paste, that copied text would be duplicated as the new title of the sequence. This is actually what appears to be happening, yet there is no copying and pasting being done by me.

6

The title of a Scrivener document (in my world) is a field in the Binder. It sounds like you mean something else, maybe a paragraph in the document, at the top of it.

Also, I don’t understand the phrase sequence folder. I think you mean folder.

7

I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure there are only two kinds of containers in the Binder inside the manuscript. One is the folder, the other is the file. Am I right am I wrong?

I have the documents (which represent scenes, half scenes, and scenelets), nested inside of chapters nested inside of sequences. The sequences and chapters are folders, and the documents are files.

So when I say documents, I’m speaking about the third level of hierarchy. When I say sequences, I’m speaking about the first level of hierarchy (not counting the manuscript level of hierarchy which supersedes all three of these). When I say chapters (which I have not said here because chapters seem to be untouched in this), I am talking about the middle level of hierarchy.

Screen Shot 2022-04-27 at 6.31.04 PM
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Maybe a visual would help. The first level, folders in brown, represents the sequences (known as episodes to the reader). The second level, folders in green, represents chapters. The third level is documents only, representing scenes and partial scenes, color-coded to dialogue, action, and narrative. The titles of the scenes are invisible to the reader, and they all appear seamlessly as one piece of text. The sequence and chapter titles are folders, and are configured to appear in the book.

8

You can call them anything you like, based on your own thought process, but to Scrivener they are folders and files. Both are also called documents.

Both can contain documents nested inside them, in which case they’re also called containers in addition to document and file. That distinction matters only for structure-based compile settings.

Sequence, episode, scene, chapter, part, etc. are useful English words, but Scrivener places no meaning on those words, hence neither do users like myself.

9

Thank you.

But the worst mistake an author can make is telling the reader what they already know.

10

But we’re not concerned here with your communication with your reader. We are trying to understand exactly what is happening to your Scrivener project, and how it differs from what you want to happen. Using terms that describe objects in your manuscript, rather than objects in Scrivener, impedes that effort.

Using your screenshot for reference, could you give an example of the behavior you’re seeing?

11

Based on that, I think you’re using the word title the same way I do (binder field/document name), but I’m unclear on exactly what’s happening. Is a title changing and nothing else?

12

Yes, I would be happy to do that for you.

I would have assumed that most writers who use Scrivener would understand the concept of scenes nested into chapters nested into sequences or ‘parts’ and understand that hierarchy as applied to the Binder. Other than books that do not use sequences listed in the TOC, that is about as common a configuration as novels in literary fiction get. My apologies.

What I am seeing is titles in the sequence folders (Brown) in the first level of hierarchy being spontaneously and randomly replaced by titles of the files (multicolored) in the third level of hierarchy.

13

As if a lower level document title is copied, then pasted to another document’s title! I can’t think of a way to make that happen, even if I want it to.

14

Exactly.

And I don’t want it to happen. Yet it keeps happening, and I am not doing any copying or pasting of titles.

15

I got that. If I could think of a way to make it happen, maybe I’d know how to prevent it.

16

Use of text-to-speech is an interesting complicating factor. Do you also use voice commands also to navigate? Do you use voice commands for copying and pasting? The combination of the two might provide a vehicle for these mishaps.

Hitting return when a binder item is selected puts you in edit mode on the title of that item, so it is certainly easy to get into that mode. But I still can’t quite see an easy way one would regularly end up carrying the title of one item over to the title of another! Interesting puzzle.

17

That’s for sure.

No voice commands other than actual editing of the text (new line, capitalize that, etc.), no copying and pasting.

I’m in editing/revision mode, so there isn’t a lot of typing.

I would only hit return on the title of a binder item if I intended to change it. At this point, the sequence titles, chapter titles, and scene titles are pretty fixed, unless something changes them unexpectedly like this.

I injured both hands pretty badly at the end of January and it’s healing very slowly, so I started using speech to text. And boy does that suck.

18

Thank you for clarifying. People use all sorts of Binder structures, that may or may not match the ultimate structure of the output document. (Being able to do that is sort of the point.) So I always try to make sure I understand exactly what people are trying to do.

Under what circumstances does the problem occur? When you’re renaming items? When you’re moving things around? Under other circumstances entirely?

How are you navigating around the Binder? Mouse/trackpad? Keyboard?

What version of Scrivener do you have?

19

I wish that were true, but hitting return creates a subdocument – at my machine at least.

20

It’s configurable. Preferences/Behaviors/Return Key pane.