Let me begin by saying that the functionality built into Scrivener continues to amaze me. As I continue to use the application, and just about as I am begin to say, “I really wish I could do this,” I discover that I can do it. The latest example of this was clicking on the chevron in the upper righthand corner of the Outline View pane and getting the ability to change the columns shown. (I am, however, not quite sure why you didn’t use the right-click in the column header that is used in iTunes, but I don’t really care.)
Here is how I am currently using Outline View:
What I would like to be able to do is to print this exact view to send it to my editor, as a kind of status report. However, the printed version of outline view seems stuck in one particular version of things. Is there a way to change this, or is this really a feature request?
Thanks for the kind words. Good point about having right-click open the columns menu in the outliner header bar, too - I’ve implemented that to complement the chevron in the next version. (When the feature was first implemented several years ago, right-click menus in header bars wasn’t supported.)
Regarding your question, the only way of printing off the exact contents of the outliner would be to use print screen, or with a screenshot. There’s no built-in way of printing outline views in OS X, and laying an outliner view with multiple columns out across multiple pages would be a complex spreadsheet-like operation that’s not really supported. You can, however, customise the printing to a certain degree by going to File > Page Setup > Settings > Scrivener > Options.
This is so close to what I want that … that … I am perfectly satisfied. (No, not as neat as the columnar view, but I completely understand how difficult that is to achieve – I also use Bento to keep track of tasks for the “other” parts of my work, and I am routinely underwhelmed by its printing of table views.) I prefer your quite human, text-oriented solution.
Well, no, this doesn’t work. Changing the print attributes that emerge out of your printer by going to File > Page Setup > Settings > Scrivener > Options doesn’t work. It only changes the print attributes on the screen. This is either 1) how it’s supposed to work, though more likely it is 2) a bug.
A screenshot is also not a good solution: it looks grainy and the size of the text is out of your control.
If you want get a nice print version of the outliner view on a Mac, go to File > Print Current Document then select the PDF button to save as a PDF. Open the PDF in w/the Mac application Preview (not Adobe Reader!), select the text, copy it, then paste it into a Word or Text Edit document. It’s a dirty solution, you’ll have to fiddle with the formatting in Word, but it works.
And by the way, developers, it took me two days to figure this out. That’s just wrong. I don’t want to spend my time on this. I’ve had Scrivener less than a week and I’m already finding glitches-bugs-impasses? And can’t even find a correct way to fix it on the message boards? Please, try harder. My novel is a sucking black hole, I need you!
I’m not sure where you got “developers” (plural) from - there is only one developer - me; Scrivener is a labour of love, designed and created out of my own struggles with writing a novel, and I work very hard to fix all bugs and glitches - but obviously I can’t fix things if you don’t report them.So please try to take into consideration how you might feel if a stranger walked into your place of work, disregarded the sweat on your brow, and told you to “try harder”.
Changing the attributes in the Page Setup options has no effect on what appears on screen, so I’m not sure what you mean there. Going through Page Setup > Settings etc is a Mac thing, by the way - that’s just the standard placement for print settings on OS X.
If you want to export the outline, then the best way is via Compile, choosing only titles and synopses; the next update will have CSV export for the outliner, too. Printing works through Print Current Document, so I’m not sure what problems you are having without more information, but it’s not possible to print the on-screen representation as that just wouldn’t work on paper.
If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend you go through the interactive tutorial project, as it sounds as though you are still getting to grips with the interface in general and that will get you up and running with most things (although it doesn’t cover printing the outline) - beyond that, the Help file is a great resource, and we do our best to answer all (polite…) enquiries on this forum, too.
I’ve got a Compile which does something pretty much what you’re after; no word count tho. I think you can add this using the placeholder tag things (… whatever they’re called…).
I can email it if you want. Or I’m happy to post it up somewhere on the forum if that’s going to work better…
I noticed that this question is several years old and I was curious if the capability of printing “tags” in the outline view has changed? I couldn’t find anything in the forum that suggested otherwise. Thank you in advance for your help!
