One thing I would find very useful esp in early stages of drafting is if the synopsis would update to reflect the current first lines of my document.
NB this is different - I think - from ‘autofill synopsis from main text’ which seems to create a synopsis on the basis of current text, but not then update that synopsis to reflect changes in the main text.
I for one would find great value in being able to do both auto-fill and auto-generate, and choose which one I want, at least on a project level but ideally also on a document level.
I think what I want can currently be done in cork board view but not in synopsis view.
I’ve just tested this in the Mac V3.0.1 and the auto-generation of synopses is dynamic.
Actually, auto-generate is bit of a misnomer I think — if the synopsis is blank, then it shows you the first few lines of the text instead, rather than actually populating the synopsis field — the Inspector Synopsis itself remains empty. So it will always show the updated text, because it’s just a view, not fixed data — while the ‘auto-fill’ does populate the Synopsis field which then stays the same till you change it manually (or re-run the auto-fill command, of course).
Anyway – you can see the results in the screenshot, where I’ve added text to the first document. If you want the first few lines of the text to show in the outline, then you need to set the outline to show fixed height (View > Outline options > Use Fix Row Height).
Thanks so much for this. I did not know about the need for fixed line height to make this work and was looking fruitlessly for a command to ‘auto-generate’. It now does populate the synopsis area with the first three lines of text - while also leaving the synopsis field itself blank, as you say - or leave three blank lines if no text is present.
In case you happen to know off the top of your head - is there a setting to change the number of lines displayed from 3 to something else? Don’t worry if you don’t know, I can look myself!
As far as I can tell, it’s set to three lines of synopsis/text. You can vary the row spacing (in Preferences > Appearance > Outliner > Options ), and the font size and colour (… > Fonts), but I think that’s it.
BTW, in case you’ve not come across it yet, there’s another new view setting for the Outliner — you can centre it, which is useful if you’re just working with the Title and Synopsis. There are icons for this and the fixed height feature at the bottom right of the outliner itself.
You can save both these settings (and the layout of the other columns) into a Layout (Window > Layouts), which means you can easily set up various ‘spreadsheet’ views rather than having to set them up each time.
