print complete outline (draft) with all indents etc?

daveyc · June 15, 2007, 4:57pm

…so i’m working on an enormous training manual, scrivener is the ultimate organization tool…there are several modules, tons of components within each (chapters) and associated subtopics/subchapters

they all display beautifully in the top level draft outline view and it’s quite simple to drop the arrows and see everything…

problem is, right now this draft outline master view functions as my writer’s table of contents and i like to print it out sometimes to view the flow of things and how stuff should be moved around (it’s very long)

right now, i’m taking tons of screen captures and simply printing out in one combined view (pics on a page technically) just to see the visual indents and flow…

BUT is there a plan to allow for a ‘print outline of all/section/folder’ type command? seems that there may be interest in this feature from others…

OR am i missing something? is there a way to auto-generate a TOC from the folders/sections/subsections and simply use that?

AmberV · June 15, 2007, 5:21pm

Sans indenting, you can pretty easily print out all of the titles using Export Draft, and setting the content options to just print titles for all item types (or just the types you want). You can use the format options to set the title types to different fonts. This is about all you can do to represent hierarchy though, using the standard exporter.

If you use the MMD => XHTML exporter (since you are just using titles, it doesn’t matter if you are actually using MMD or not), you can get a proper hierarchy in HTML format. Using this method, you can get indents just fine. This can be loaded in a browser and printed from the browser. If you want to take that route, I can give you some step-by-step instructions.

KB · June 15, 2007, 6:03pm

Hi, excluding AmberV’s suggestion, I’m afraid there are no plans to add such a feature in the near future. In fact, as of 1.1 (in the beta forum), there will be very few new features for a while.

I’ll certainly consider this sort of thing in the future (1.5 or 2.0-ish), but that doesn’t help you right now, I’m afraid, and I don’t want to make any promises.

Best,
Keith

daveyc · June 15, 2007, 9:14pm

thanks in advance - i know zero about this exporter or if it means i have to install something new…but html output is perfect for viewing or printing…

and keith, i totally hear you on holding off on new features - it’s already a killer app in my own estimation, this is just one of those other things…gonna look over the TOC related features as well and see if there’s something to do that way…

AmberV · June 15, 2007, 9:26pm

To reiterate: This technique requires no knowledge of MMD. You will not have to install anything (Scrivener has a version of MMD built right in). All we will be doing is using its inherit ability to create a nice list of headers for our own purposes. I am going to be putting this tip in the next version of the FAQ, in the advanced section, but here it is now:

If the tip in the Input/Output section above does not produce an outline that you can use, you might be able to use MultiMarkdown to create a much more flexible outline. MultiMarkdown syntax in the rest of your document is not a requirement, as we will only be working with titles (and optionally synopsis). The one drawback to this method is that while it creates a nice print outline in a browser, since the titles are not actually indented, this cannot be used to import into a proper outliner which parses indented lines.

First, we need to add a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to your Scrivener projectâ€™s export engine. Go to the File menu, and choose MultiMarkdown Settings. You will see a list on the left, and large text area beside it. Click the â€˜+â€™ button below the list, and type in â€˜XHTML Headerâ€™, without the quotes. It is important to capitalise everything correctly. In the large text area, copy and paste this block of style information:

Also note that this particular stylesheet will automatically number the first two header depths. So, if you use the classic Book/Part/Chapter/Section structure, it will number the Parts with Roman Numerals, and the Chapters with numbers. The Chapter numbers will not reset between parts. Anything below the chapter level simply gets an asterisks in front of it. If you do not want automatic numbering, use the following stylesheet instead. This will simply print titles verbatim, and indent them according to depth:

<style type="text/css" media="all">body { font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman', serif; } h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; margin: 0; line-height: 1.4em; } h1 { margin-top: .5em; } h2 { margin-left: 3em; } h3 { margin-left: 6em; } h4 { margin-left: 9em; } h5 { margin-left: 12em; } h6 { margin-left: 15em; } p { margin-left: 300px; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; width: 300px; font-size: .8em; } p strong { visibility: collapse; }</style>
Also note that counter numbering is a CSS feature that is not completely supported by all browsers. You may need to upgrade your browser to the most recent version. I have tested this stylesheet in Firefox 2, and Safari 3. If numbering does not work for you, and you do not want to upgrade or change browsers, you might want to use the simplified stylesheet above.

Why use this method, when Scrivener has an HTML exporter that doesn’t use the MultiMarkdown engine? The HTML exporter is provided by Apple, and does not actually inject any semantics into the HTML. It makes every attempt to copy the appearance of the RTF version. Thus, titles will not be contained in HTML header elements, but rather in styled blocks with increased font sizes and such. As such, this is perfectly useless when used in conjunction with a stylesheet.

Addenda: It seems there is a bug in some recent versions of the MMD package, in the script that is responsible for converting quotes to typographic quotes. If exporting from Scrivener produces an HTML document that doesn’t indent, or has messed up numbering, that is probably what is going on. There is a relatively simple fix, but one could just wait until the next update. This bug may not show up if you are using the non-beta version of Scrivener. I haven’t verified that though.