Question About Magic Folders in the Binder

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Greetings!

I started using Scrivener toward the end of 2012. When I started I was heavily into FreeMind + a bunch of other tools to get Scrivener’s functionality, so I already had a way of doing things. Since then new projects on my part and new revs on Scrivener’s part means it’s about time I did things the Scrivener way. Might actually make my life a bit easier.

Some of the folders in the binder have magic properties. Originally “Manuscript” and “Trash” (there may have been others back in 2012, but I deleted those and replaced them with my own). A few days ago I opened a new “Novel” project and immediately saved it. Looking at the folders (and reading the “Novel Format” file) I see that “Characters” and “Places” are not magical (no idea about “Research”). And experimentation has shown me that “Front Matter” and “Template Sheets” are. Well “Template Sheets” looks pretty cool (love that I can create more templates, drop them in the folder, and they work), and I’m willing to at least try “Front Matter”, but I cannot drag and drop these folders from my newest project to an existing project. The folders, contents, and the icon for “Front Matter” comes across, but the magic is gone.

I suppose I could create a fresh scriv project then drag the contents of my old scriv project to the new one, but the project is 697.8 MB. I thought maybe there was some property hidden in the scrivx file, but comparing the “BinderItem” records for the “Template Sheets” folder doesn’t seem to yield an answer (I must be blind).

What am I missing? Can I put the magic folders back into an existing project? I’m not put off by hand editing XML.

In a related note, setting the “Label” property on an item in my old project causes the icon in the binder to be tinted by the color of the label. However this doesn’t work at all in my new “Novel” project. I like the tint. I’m used to the tint. How can I have tint in brand new projects?

Thanks a million.

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Manuscript, Research, and Trash are permanently “magical” folders; you can’t delete them or make them sub-folders of another folder, though I think you can rename any of them if you like.

The others are only magical because they were set that way by the person who created the project/template. When you drag a folder from one project to another that setting doesn’t follow.

For the “Templates” folder, you select that folder in the binder and then use the menu “Project->Set Selection as Templates Folder” to make it behave magically. Note that on the Mac version, other folders can work with your Templates to gain a magic of their own. By selecting the Characters folder, for instance, you can go to Documents->Default New Document Type (or similar, I’m not at my Mac, and the Windows version doesn’t yet have this feature). Choose the kind of document you want when you hit CMD-N, and that will be the template that appears–no need to select it from a list of templates every time.

To make the Front Matter folder work as desired, in the Compile window, in the Contents section, enable the “Add front matter” checkbox and select the folder from the drop-down list. Actually, you’ll want to select a sub-folder that corresponds to what you need for the end result. You’ll probably want to read up on Front Matter in the manual to better understand how to use it to best effect.

To tint your icons to match your Label color, go to View->Use Label Colors In->Icons

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Thanks a million, rdale. SOLVED. :smiley: