hello,
I would like to organise information about characters. I’ve got a few sections contained in each character file:
general, background, physical descr, gestures, speech, personality, habits, relationships, health, memories.
At first I kept all of these in one character file, but the file has grown and I ended up having to scroll down a lot and waste time looking for each section.
I’ve started looking for a way to easily find the proper section when needed.
At first, I changed the titles of the sections to headers, so I could place a table of contents at the top of my file, and clicking on the title would take me down to the proper section.
I haven’t found information anywhere about how to create such a table of contents. Instead, I found information how to create a table of contents for files from the binder but this is not the same, I want it inside one file, only listing the headers placed in that particular file.
So my second idea was to split the character file into several files, where each separate file would be one of the above mentioned sections, all of them grouped under one file containing the character’s name.
This works well, because I can see the “contents” in the binder now, and can easily find the proper section, and immediately open it.
However, the big problem is that I cannot copy the whole structure to recreate it for another character. I don’t want to create this structure file by file per each character. When I select a file in the binder, the option edit->copy is not active.
How can I easily transfer this structure to different characters?
Or else, what would be the best approach to organise information about each character to contain the sections I mentioned and move easily between them?
thank you for any advice
Hello Fairydora,
One way to achieve what you want would possibly be to create a character folder in the research side. Label it characters and then in that folder have a folder for each character with as many documents in each as you need. Have a blank character folder in there set up like the others but with no detail. Each time you plan a new character just duplicate the blank one (right mouse on it and select duplicate) and rename it and fill it with new details. Sounds long winded but is actually very quick. Might be worth looking into collections too. Good luck.
Thank you Shass . I think this will work. My main problem was that I didn’t see the option “duplicate”, I was completely fixed on the idea that I have to use “Ctrl+C” which didn’t work. Need to start thinking out of the box a bit more. Thanks and have a nice day!
This leaves us with the second question though- is it possible to have a table of contents created automatically inside a file, based on the header structure in this particular file?
Scrivener can’t create a table of contents with links to places within an individual file the way you’re talking about. If you wanted something like this, you could use inspector comments to create “bookmarks” to each of the places–select each header and create a new comment with that header text, so that you’d essentially turn the inspector comments section into your contents for the file. Clicking a comment would scroll the editor to that section.
I’d say your solution of splitting the large character file into multiple small files that can then be selected directly from the binder is more in line with Scrivener’s design of breaking long documents into smaller, more manageable sections. You can simplify the process of creating a new set of character sheets by setting up a Templates folder in your binder and creating a blank set of the documents there. To do that, just create a folder somewhere in your binder and with it selected, choose Project > Set Selection as Templates Folder. You’ll see the folder’s icon will change to a blue square with a white T inside, indicating it’s now the special template folder for the project.
Any files or folders you put in here will be available to duplicate elsewhere in the project using Project > New From Template. (Clicking the split menu button on the main toolbar green “Add” button will also offer the New From Template option.) So if you put a blank set of character files here, the parent “Character name” file and then the others as its subdocuments, with all the base text and titles but none of the specifics filled out, you can use the New From Template option elsewhere in the binder to recreate that entire set of documents instantly, ready for you to fill out with new character details.
The document templates can also be used for a single character sheet, if you choose to use that method instead. You could set up a base document that had all the header sections already marked with inspector comments, so you’d just need to fill out the character specifics.
Hello Jennifer,
Thank you very much for your answer, it’s very explanatory and covering everything I need.
I’ll stick to the idea of splitting the character files into several smaller files, representing sections. The idea with bookmarks is also good for organising the content inside the already split files, if I need “subsections”.
Thanks and best regards
Dora
