I know this may be outside the parameters of the software, but is there a means of inserting objects into a Scrivener doc?
Essentially I want to create a base template for characters and it would be advantageous to create a fixed menu for things like eye and hair color, that I could just pick as a field value.
I come from the programming world (you probably guessed that) and this seems like something that could be done, but I can’t find it in the manual. Am I missing something or is this just not something the program was expected to do?
AFAIK, no, you cannot create checkboxes, pulldowns, etc. inside Scriv documents using Scrivener. But Scriv documents are just .rtf docs. So, perhaps you could create these objects in a document using some other software and then import that document into Scrivener?
Scrivener does support the creation of project-wide custom metadata fields. These don’t live inside a document; you access & set them for each document from the Outliner and the Inspector.
See the manual sections C.4 Custom Metadata and 13.5 Metadata Tab for details.
Example - this is the Inspector metadata tab for one of my projects. I have a custom pulldown called POV, which will tell me whether the POV character for this scene is Aaron or Clare.
A downside of Scrivener’s implementation of custom metadata is that they are project-wide, not document-specific. Meaning, if you create a pulldown with values for eye and hair color, you’re going to see that in ALL of your documents, not just your character templates.
Thanks for the response. I thought it was probably a longshot. I had seen some of the meta-data information in a tutorial video, but was aware these wouldn’t be document specific.
I don’t know that RTF supports it either, but I’ll take a look at the possibility. Thanks.
You’re really talking about some form of scripting, rather than just text, as well as an engine capable of executing the script. So no, not something Scrivener can do.
On top of potential RTF limitations, we also have the limitations of three different operating systems (or programming environments, more accurately) to contend with. Even if by some magic an RTF file with forms imported properly into the Windows version, for example—in an interactive way where the state of the form is persistently saved once it is flushed from RAM—I highly doubt it would survive passage through the iPhone/iPad version of Scrivener, which can’t even properly handle basics like bullet lists, tab stops or tables.
The above tips on how to use Scrivener’s metadata system in the sidebar (or outliner) has always been the answer to the question of packing interactive information into outline entries.
If you do try to import a complex RTF file, I would urge doing so in a throw-away test project (the tutorial is a good target as it is easy to reset if it gets messed up). While we’ve probably fixed all of the crashes and malfunctions that may result from trying to parse complicated formatting, who knows—and as implied we have had to fix such problems in the past.
Keywords seem like another possibility. You can set up a hierarchical set of keywords that relate to characters, then simply click your choice of them to assign to a character sheet document. The keywords associated with a doc show up in the inspector rather than in the body of the document, of course.
