I’m new to Scrivener and still trying to figure out what it can and can’t do.
I really like the ability to select a set of documents, and then edit either their synopses (in the corkboard view) or their text (in edit scrivenings).
I’d ALSO like to do something similar with the data accessed through the inspector and outliner. I can select 5, non-contiguous documents and see/edit their synopses (in the corkboard), or their text (in edit scrivenings mode) - but I can’t seem to do this in the outliner.
For example, I’d like to see only those sections with a particular character, and use a keywords or document notes to map out themes or continuity - so it would be useful to have a view that let’s one
select only specific subsections (e.g., by keyword)
see and edit, at the same time, all the metadata associated with the selected subsections (either in a card view or an outline view)
I hope I’m making myself clear. Is there a way to do this?
If I understand you correctly, you are just asking for the corkboard to act the same as the corkboard, is that right? That is, so that if you select arbitrary documents in the corkboard, the outliner can show the selection, just as the corkboard can? I’m afraid this isn’t possible at the moment - only the corkboard can show arbitrary documents (well, Edit Scrivenings can too). But this is definitely coming with 2.0. In version 2.0 - out later this year - the corkboard, outliner and Edit Scrivenings are designed to be synonymous modes. That is, what can be viewed in one, can be viewed in the others. So you will be able to view arbitrary documents in the outliner (and even sort the columns).
“corkboard, outliner and Edit Scrivenings are designed to be synonymous modes” sounds like half of what I’m looking for.
The other half is being able to see/edit (i.e. inspect) the metadata for all of the selected items, at the same time. It looks like I can do this for some things (the fields that can be displayed in the outliner), but not all. For example, it would be useful to see, not just the synopses of selected sections, but the keywords and document notes as well.
There’s no way of viewing keywords or notes in the outliner… I can’t imagine how notes could be viewed in the outliner, given that notes are rich text. Keywords are also problematic as they are a list. Even if they were displayed in the outliner, there would be no way of editing them “all at once”. You can make batch changes to any of the items that use a checkbox (Page Break Before etc) by holding down the Opt key as you click on one, and label and status can be batch-changed via the ctrl-click menu. You can assign keywords to multiple documents in one go by selecting the documents you want to affect in the binder, outliner or corkboard, and then dragging the keywords from the Keywords HUD onto one of the selected documents - all selected documents will be affected.