Hi,
Forgive me if I am not seeing the obvious but this is making me crazy.
When I create a text document on the cork board it will turn into a index card. I want it to remain a text document. This way I can add text to the individual text documents and see all the other text documents. This also provides me with the option to open up each individual text document and write in it. I managed this before but for some reason I can not do so now. Please help.
rookie
The cork board view is for the index card view. To see the editor where you do the actual writing, as opposed to short synopses, change from cork board view to editor/scrivenings view. There’s a view mode icon in your toolbar that has 3 tiny icons within it. One is the cork board, then others represent an outline view and the editor/scrivenings view. Click on that and you’ll be golden.
I recommend that you start going through the Interactive Tutorial (under Help), working through it a bit at a time as you have the patience and energy for it. It will show you how to work with Scrivener at your own pace.
Thank you Robert,
I like the option of having six index cards in front of me and bouncing back and forth between the cards. It seems that for me it is a good way to generate ideas. Is there any way of compiling the index cards or would one have to copy each index card and then paste it to a text document?
Thanks for your patience,
rookie
It is possible to compile the synopses (i.e. the text on the index cards), but you’ll be much more limited with that than working with the main document text. If all you’re doing now is jotting ideas, shuffling cards around, etc. and want a way to print that off or pull it together in a single document via compile, that will work fine, and you can then get down to the business of filling in the real document text, either in those documents associated with the index cards or in new documents in the project. If you want the text you’re writing now to be part of the main document, however, you can use the split editor feature to view all the cards on the corkboard in one editor and then load each document in the second editor so you can write in it. This lets you “bounce around” without having to actually toggle the view back and forth repeatedly.
To do that, load the corkboard with the cards in the editor, then choose one of the split options from View > Layout. Both editors will initially show the same thing, but you can load anything in either to change that. I’d suggest clicking the double-arrow button in the footer of the editor you want to remain as the corkboard; this will link the editors so that clicking a card on the corkboard will load that card in document view in the second editor. This will give you a smooth way to move around through the cards and their text.