Not sure if this has been suggested before (I did search…), but when I’m developing a novel I often want to read the synopsis as a whole and edit it as I go, to try and get the story flow right. I can do this in corkboard view to a certain extent, but because the index cards are a uniform size it’s hard to get a size that shows the full text on all scenes without leaving lots of whitespace on many scenes, which then makes reading for flow difficult. The alternative is to compile them into a text document, but that makes editing cumbersome.
What I’d really like to do is view the synopses in sequence as a continuous document, just like the Scrivenings view.
(I know one can automate synopsis creation from text, which would be OK if I completed my all scene synopses first by creating scrivenings and then overwrote them with narrative, but I work in a much more organic way and need to be able to edit the synopses at various points in the drafting process.)
Have you tried the outline view, with just document name and synopsis showing? The individual rows will expand to show the full synopsis under the title, and you can add them or edit them as you please.
Good point - hadn’t thought of that! I mostly use Outline mode to track word count and therefore have synopses hidden. I’d have to slide the columns around a bit between usages, but it might work…
I believe that if you save your layout (Window->Layout->Manage Layouts), you can easily jump back and forth between the two sets of outliner columns without much effort. You can also add the layouts button to the toolbar for convenience.
Oh, cool - you learn something new every day! I’ve been using Scrivener since 2007, but I confess I don’t explore its nooks and crannies as much as I should
