Thanks for the feedback!
- Yup, that’s already on the list of things to be implemented in the future. We hope to make this so that you can both see and edit the section names in the Scrivenings session.
- This information is available by hitting Shift-Ctrl-I (that’s a capital ‘i’). This just pops up a floating Inspector with all of that information, so naturally the index card at the top of it will tell you where you are. Shift-Ctrl-I toggles it off again too, so you can just tap it twice to glance at it and then dismiss it if you don’t want it floating around.
- The problem of numbering things is something we have on the longer-term list for thinking about. It’s a little more complicated than it might seem on the surface, because the outline that you see in the binder may not necessarily be anything like the topology of the headings that are generated by compile (let alone any numbers that are produced within the text or in binder titles!). Just to provide a very simple example of what I mean, what happens if your compile settings are using a Collection as the source? That could mean that only a scattering of files throughout the Draft are actually being used to generate the final document. So what about all of the others not included? Simply running a sequence counter in the outliner and corkboard view would not at all be representative of the output. Another simple example is if you select a section in the draft and in the Inspector disable its “Include in Compile” checkbox. Perhaps you decide that section isn’t necessary, so by checking the box you snip it out of the draft. Does the numbering skip over that? But what if your compile settings are set to include all documents, regardless of this checkbox? There is also performance to consider, if the number is actually representative of anything coming out of the compiler, and not just some abstract increment in the displays, then all of this counting and deciding what does or doesn’t get counted would need to be done in real-time as you work, and right now the only way to get a comprehensive and accurate count off of the placeholders is to do a full compile! Why? You might have <$n> counters in the text documents themselves, incrementing counters that are otherwise generated by the compiler. We can’t assume that someone is only going to be working in one very narrow, specific way or the accuracy of the feature is lost and it becomes meaningless. To get a grasp on the performance problems of calculating from a full background compile, try loading up the Project Statistics panel on a +80,000 word project and see how long it takes to paginate for the stats. That’s how long you would have to wait for the binder to update the numbering each time you moved, created, or removed an outline component.
There could be some solutions to these problems, but they would most likely involve some fairly extensive re-wiring of the current system so that these numbers can be calculated and indexed in a more efficent manner. Another solution is that the numbers would just get out of date as you work. We have such a system in place on the Mac right now for Inspector footnotes (as you can play with in the new beta). When you compile, all of the footnotes are counted up and this number is printed in the footnote box so you can cross-reference the print-out with the software. However this is a cached number. If you remove a footnote or move one around, the cache degrades in accuracy. So caching the generated numbers is another approach, but is probably even more prone to problems than cached footnote numbers (which are likely to shift around less than sectional numbering).
For the moment, a reasonably efficient solution to this problem, in my opinion, is attained by using creating an “Outline” version of your compile settings. By that I mean, just save your current settings as a preset, then visit the Formatting pane and disable all bulk text output, leaving only the titles. Now you have a concise outline that matches the precise output of your book. You can doctor that up in a manner similar to the “Enumerated Outline” preset, if you want, which would indent by depth so that it isn’t all coming out in a flat list. In fact you could even start with that preset and tweak it so that the heading output matches your normal output. If for instance only folders and file groups generate headings, you could just delete all of the text document levels from the Formatting pane, and remove the Title checkmark and title prefix, leaving it so that text files output nothing.
All right, so you have this preset set up. Compile to RTF and then drop the compiled file back into the binder at the top for your reference. Now you have a 100% accurate numbered list at your fingertips whenever you need it.