I know that in inspector there is a document references section where I can add documents as references. However, I like to see everything in the outliner and binder. Is there a way or could this be implemented where you could duplicate documents in a way, where the duplicate acts as a shortcut/link to the original document? For example, you can create shortcuts of files on windows and mac that open the original file, but you can move them to any location you wish. Or simply have an outliner column that lists all the document references?
Have you tried out the Collections feature yet? It’s basically like references, but over in the binder sidebar area instead of the inspector. Since the items are listed in the sidebar, selecting many at once will display them in the main editor as corkboard cards, etc.
Read more about Collections in §7.4, Using Collections, pg. 62 on.
Thanks. Never used collections before, but they seem to work okay for this purpose. However, is it possible to indent files, drop them under others? Doesn’t seem to work on Windows at least.
I’d like to drop scenes under “theme folders” so that I can keep track of thematic progression without disturbing scene order in the story. Collections would work if there was a way to indent files.
If you give each theme a keyword, then search for that keyword and save it (use the search bar in the top right, click on the magnifying glass and choose ‘keyword’), it will be in its own collection, which will retain the original binder order of the scenes. It will automatically update as you add new scenes with that theme.
Will that help?
Collections are for creating lists of items, either by hand or automatically via some search criteria that you establish. So you wouldn’t be able to achieve binder levels of organisation, only the master outline in the binder does that.
I do agree that “themes” sounds an awful lot like keywords or some other form of meta-data. Scrivener is based around the idea of combining meta-data models with a singular outline. It keeps the literal order of things canonical while also providing quite a lot of power in combination with listing and grouping features—kind of like “folders+tags” as seen in some systems.