I have both “take control of scrivener” and “writing a novel with scrivener”, the latter bought before buying the program itself.
They have been quite useful. The “writing a novel” put me on the right track immediately saving me quite some time since I am currently using scrivener for novel writing.
But both books do not go deep into some hard to find or hard to figure aspects. They have a general approach, which is of course expected. But there are plenty of features that have been overlooked and probably the easiest way to teach and explain them is by examples.
I learned MS Word with a dummy book, and this was long time ago. It was a good book because it was based on real case scenario.
So, for example, some of the less common cases I would like to suggest are the following:
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I have to import several text documents from different sources, like ms word doc, rtf, because my job is to organize all the material into a book. I get distracted if all the material comes in with a different style, I’d like everything to have a default style (same font, same size, same leading, same smart quotes).
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And what about trying to automate the import process? I could creating a smart folder where I put my text documents and this folder automatcically feeds scrivener. These documents go directly into the binder, and maybe the file name becomes the binder folder name, and each document is already split (command+k thing) at every new paragraph or double carriage return.
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Bookmarks. What if I want to “bookmark” a paragraph or a word for a later review. We could create a reference sheet at the beginning of the manuscript where we put all the bookmarks and we use is as a smart navigation system. A sort of a to do list. Will it work with hyperlinks? So I click on an item of the list and I jump immediately on the place of the text that I marked for reviewing or editing?
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Keyboards shortcuts are important. So whenever there is one for an action explained in the book I’ll put it as a side note or in the text. I think of my dummy books as reference so it is common to jump from chapter to chapter, hence the repetition of keyboards actions.
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Snapshots and compare, which are beautifully explained in the video, have many tricks up their sleeves. A summary would be useful.
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The title page. Let’s say a writer as a double identity, a pen name for fiction, a real name for academic essays. How can we have a set of cover pages to choose from? How to efficiently use those “<$>”.
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Templates. Walktrought creating a couple of templates.
I hope to have been more useful tan boring.
Looking forward to buying your book.
Good work!