I work primarily out of a folder “Scenes.” It’s where I keep text documents until they have a place in the Manuscript. They aren’t “Done,” “To do,” part of any draft, or even necessarily “in progress.” They’re simply unplaced.
I want anything I type in “Scenes” or its sub-documents, to be included in my daily session target.
I don’t want the “Scenes” folder or anything in it to be included in compile.
I don’t want to “Count text written anywhere in the project” as part of the session target. (I use the “Research” folder. I didn’t write 20,000 words today. I copied a bunch of articles into research.)
It seems like the only options to achieve these three goals, is keep “Scenes” in the Manuscript folder and manually maintain a label, status, or collection, to exclude from compile.
This is frustrating. I have over one-hundred documents in “Scenes,” and more are added or removed daily. There seems to be no way to tell Scrivener: “Everything in this folder should be given this collection, label, or status.” Or even “when I add a document to this folder it should be given a custom status by default.”
Is there really no less-manual way to have un-compiled documents included in the daily session target?
You can do that with a document template. Create a template document with the desired metadata pre-assigned, then make that template the default for new documents in the specified folder.
In the Compile menu I see four options to filter by: collection, label, status, or selection.
Collection, label, and status means I need to manually apply said value to every document I don’t want to compile.
When I try filtering by selection it only works if I have every individual document under “Scenes” selected in the binder before filtering. Just selecting the folder excludes text applied to the folder itself. I can’t just say: "Filter everything in “Scenes.” I have to open every subfolder to select the individual text files.
Note that you can bulk-apply Label and Status values. Select all the relevant documents in the Binder, then right-click and choose the option for the setting you want.
The way I handle this issue in my own work is a little different, though. I have sub-folders within the Draft. Some of them are short stories, one of them is the main novel draft, and one of them is “Scraps.” When I’m ready to Compile, I select the master folder for whatever I’m Compiling from the dropdown at the top of the Contents list, and go from there.
You’ll see for my exclusion I’ve selected Hacking the Meetup and Executing Change.
The expected behaviour from Exclude > Documents in Current Selection is that it would exclude the underlying files in those folders as well. The Compile doesn’t, which makes the exclusion somewhat redundant for certain use-cases, like yours—where the content of Scenes changes over time. That’s a shortcoming for the developers to look at.
You’re on Mac, I’m on Windows. The expected behaviour might work on Mac if you select Scenes for your need. I don’t know.
There is something for that, since there are a few things here and there that do require full selections rather than implied (everything below this point) selections. The Edit ▸ Select ▸ Select with Subdocuments command. This will handle the expansion and selection for you, through multiple levels.
For one-offs that’s fine, but I prefer to filter by Collections for things that I’ll use more than once. I often have a “Compile” collection that exists purely for that. Or if you would prefer to not set up the filter every time (and then turn it back off), you can use collections for one of their alternate capabilities, as a saved selection. Load it, select all, then Reveal in Binder. Now you have your selection ready to compile.
Collections are meant to be your all-purpose filtering tool for anything that isn’t in the filter tool itself, since they can be created by search results or assembled by hand. For example, you can run a search by Section Type for “Scene”, and only compile those things.
Wouldn’t it be easier and more intuitive all round for users to add the tick box to Compile you have available for the Current Selection to be universally available, no matter your choice?
