I am an academic. I spent a decade writing in Latex/Emacs, and now another decade writing in Word (with wonderful free Zotero). For my first attempt at a book I was afraid Word would crash when things got too big. I was looking for more reliable software.
Scrivener has a great reputation. I’ve been trying it out for several days now, and I am sad to report that while I like much of what I see here, I may be going back to Word.
The reason may seem trifle:
In developing the outline of the book, organizing sections in place, putting place holders for ideas, etc. I miss one simple feature that from googling is clearly already there in the Mac version:
View/Editor/Show Titles in Scrivenings
(or perhaps Folder/Options/Show Titles in Scrivenings)
This one missing feature makes it hard for me to develop my outline.
I understand now why some users use OmniOutliner before heading into Scrivener. But even if I wanted to master yet another tool - it is only available for the Mac.
Bottom line: I can see that “Show Titles in Scrivenings” is planned for a forthcoming 2.x Windows release. I am not sure when that is, and since this is a relatively small feature I thought there may be the odd chance that you will push it out early if there were other folks like me out there. (Folks like me - you may want to chime in).
Whatever you do, when this feature is introduced into the Windows version, please bold this fact. I’ll be looking periodically, and maybe others will too
Can you not just type the titles at the top of each file (so that you can see them in Scrivenings), mark them with one of the methods mentioned in the thread below, and then exclude/include them during compile as necessary.
Interesting…
I did not know about hidden text in Word or Scrivener.
I suppose I could copy the headings in, and tag them to disappear in compilation.
But then I am exactly at the stage now where I dump numerous headings and half baked paragraphs or raw ideas. Then I shuffle them around pretty furiously to try and find a logical flow where every entity is defined before it is used, points are made at an optimal order to convince my audience. And then I add more headings and mix again.
This entails lots of section dragging around and - to the point, finally - multiple heading changes (which I will need to manually copy into the text every time to keep it in sync).
Actually, maybe not that many heading changes? Hmm…
Still not as straightforward as outline mode in Word, but I will give it a thought.
Thanks for making me aware of this option and that thread!
Assuming the Windows version has the same functionality, it is simple to shuffle sections around in the binder, or in the outliner, or in corkboard mode (far simpler, IMO, than in Word).
Also, if you are in Scrivenings, the title of whichever document currently has focus appears in the bars at the top of the page…so you can always see the title of the document currently selected.
I’m using version 2.5 on the Mac and I do NOT see a “Show Titles in Scrivenings” option, neither under View>Editor nor anywhere else. I do see those titles and might want to turn them OFF, but cannot. What’s going on?
