I am writing a new novel and want to be able to write notes as I go and refer to these notes later as the novel progresses. I have created a Notes folder and notes document (formatted with bullet numbers) and I have added this document to my project inspector as a Project Bookmark. My problem is this: the Inspector is necessarily narrow and a bit difficult to actively write in and refer to, so I opened the Quick Reference Panel and clicked on the bookmark symbol, but my notes document always opens full size in the Quick Reference pane with one of those little sliders at the bottom. This view of my project notes is too wide to work in. I have tried Zoom to resize the document in this pane, but the font just gets smaller and wider–so the slider remains. And I’ve closed and reopened my project numerous times, but I cannot get these notes to reformat to fit the width of my Quick Reference pane. And this is for any bookmarked document, not just my bulleted notes. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get my notes to fit the width of the pane in a writable and readable way. I have my editor set to page view, which I do not want to change. Otherwise my whole Scrivener 3 screen is set up normally, with binder, editor and inspector, all in default widths. I want a Quick Reference panel with project bookmarks that I can read and write in easily. Thank you for your help.
I’m sorry if I’m not understanding correctly, but from what I’m reading, you just need to drag the edge of the QR window to make that window narrower, like you would with an internet browser window. The Zoom feature adjusts the visual size of your fonts/spacing without modifying the font’s point size, and has nothing to do with the dimensions of the window you’re working in.
Hope that helps.
I would need to resize the Quick Reference window to the size of my editor to fully view my notes document text without a slider. Which, yes, I would obviously make that bigger in the usual way. But what I’m wondering is why I can’t resize the text IN the Quick Reference pane to allow me to read the full text width without the slider or making the QR window the size of my editor. There would be no point in using the quick reference window if it can’t float in a smaller form on the screen while it is still easily readable and writable. I have seen this full scaling in a smaller window in videos and informational screen shots on various sites–I just can’t get my Quick Reference window to do this without making it too big to be useful, which makes me feel I am missing some tweak or setting–even though I have combed preferences and project formatting to do so. Thank you.
QR windows can be any size (well, within limits) and you can resize the text, but they’re two separate actions.
-
resize the window, using the mouse (or a windows layout program)
-
resize the text — click in the notes and use cmd-shift-< or >. ie the normal editor zoom commands work in the QR windows as well. (The various zoom menu commands (View > Zoom) work as well. It’s worth knowing that notes panels (in the Inspector and in the QR panels are standard RTF notes, so you can do most of what you can do in the editor. Not styles, though.)
Are these not working for you?
BTW, if you are using notes to mean in ‘another document in the binder which I’ve temporarily opened in the QR panel’ rather than notes as ‘from the inspector attached to a document’, it doesn’t matter — except that of course, you CAN use styles in the QR for such documents.
I think I’m going to give up on this quest. I’ve done all the things everyone suggested–thank you!–but I’m trying to resize the text to fit in a small window similarly to a webpage that rescales for a phone, not to simply make the text smaller but to make the margins fit the window at the zoom level I choose–like an e-reader does, as an example-- so I can read my notes and still see the full width of text in the screen. I think the answer I’m hearing is this isn’t possible in the QR window. Roger that!
Sharon, that sounds exactly like we’ve been suggesting, so I’m not sure whether we’re talking at cross purposes. Here are three screenshots — they show the same document on the left (I’ve only captured the right edge to save space) with its notes in a QR panel on the right. The only difference between the three screenshots is the level of zoom that I’ve applied to the notes (cmd-shift < / > as I mentioned in my post).
(The screenshots look different in width, but that’s only because of the way I took the screenshot — the real dimensions of the editor and QR panel haven’t changed, only the zoom of the notes text.)
Isn’t this how an e-reader would do it? What else are you expecting to see?
Yes! That is exactly what I want it to do, but my QR panel won’t do this for some reason. I wonder if I’ve clicked on something in the preferences that has disallowed it to scale as you have shown? Thank you for taking the time to show this to me. Now at least I know what I want to do is, indeed, possible.
I’m sorry — I know of no setting which could prevent this happening (which doesn’t mean there isn’t one of course…). It’s certainly the default behaviour — perhaps someone else will be able to help.
Just one thing to check though — make sure that the cursor is actually inside the note itself (select some text to be sure) before you use the zoom keys/menu.
Secondly, again inside the notes, press cmd-r to see the ruler. It’s possible that something odd is going on with the tab settings.
Best bet is speak to email support, I think and explain the problem.
In the first post, it’s stated that there’s a preference for Page View for the Editor. It’s possible that it has been chosen for QR panels, as well. I just tested and experienced the previously described behavior.
In a QR panel, open a bookmarked note. Click in its text. In the Scrivener menu bar go to View > Text Editing > Hide Page View (<- it’s a toggle for Hide or Show). Better? If you don’t have immediate improvement, try toggling a couple times.
Things I noticed during testing:
Page View in the main Editor isn’t affected by the QR panel View, and vice versa.
After Page View is enabled for one bookmarked note, each of the other notes subsequently open in Page View.
After disabling Page View, the note’s margins appear to be corrupted. Simply closing the project and reopening cured that.
It’s worth a try. Good luck.
Thank you all so much for your help. In trying all suggestions, I discovered that, yes, this formatting issue was mostly a Page View issue. I disabled Page View in my QR window and the page scaled to fit the QR window, but with the margin corruption mentioned. (My QR window fill is about 2/3rds across the window versus the full width as the screenshots above show.) I first opened up the ruler in QR to fix this but the margin adjustments were fixed. I could not adjust the margins wider. And all my bookmarked documents are presenting this way. I tried adding a new bookmark, and it presented the same. So, as suggested, I tried closing and reopening the project. The QR window reopened with the original problem, which I fixed by disabling Page View , but the margin issues remained. I tried closing Scrivener multiple times as well. Sometimes the QR window will open to Page View, sometimes to disabled Page View, but always with the same margins issue. I also noticed I had more luck getting the QR window to open in non-Page-View if I opened it via the Bookmark icon in the toolbar (in steps) and not the QR icon. But to be honest, I’m still unable to see a clear pattern that opens my QR window in the correct page view consistently. And I’ve not once been able to reset the margins. This is a mystery that I now feel I need to solve–outside of its functionality in my project! I’ll let you know what I find. Thank you both so much!
I’d forgotten about page mode as I don’t use it. Sorry…
Can you try this sequence please…
-
In the main editor, turn off page view mode (ie toggle cmd-opt-shift-p till it’s off).
-
Open any document in QR view and click in it then test whether the cmd-shift-< and > zoom commands work.
-
Staying in QR mode, toggle the page mode back on (cmd-opt-shift-p) then test the zoom commands again.
For me all this works with no bugs:
In 2. the text wraps to the new width. In this view you don’t care what the page will look like when it’s compiled, you just want to see the words.
In 3 it doesn’t, and I think that’s what you’d expect – you’re in page view so you want to see the whole page, which means that it retains the margins as they’ll appear on the page and zoom just makes the page bigger or smaller as a whole.
Are you seeing anything different?
Eureka! I fixed the problem–and just by chance! I happened to look again at Preferences/Appearance/Options and noticed I had clicked “Show page view in new projects.” Thanks to everyone zeroing in on Page View, I thought to unclick this option and problem solved! Thanks again for your help!