I just spent a large part of the day testing Scrivener (Windows), going through the manual, knowledge base, forums, etc. First of all, very impressive software tool. To try it out for real, I imported a complex Word document, broke it up into many little sections and ended up using or learning about most of Scrivener’s features in the process. Here is my wishlist:
*** “Show Titles in Scrivenings” feature for Windows version (major usability gap…)
*** Synchronised highlighting of current Scrivenings section in the Binder tree (i.e. Where am I?)
*** Special paste from clipboard, where each line in clipboard becomes the title for a new file
*** Consolidate fragmented format settings into unified, logical dialog
I have some more but I won’t overdo it this first time round
Don’t despair! Item 5 on this post is the official policy. It takes a little time, but eventually it’ll be there.
AFAIK auto sync highlight will never happen, but you may use Ctrl-Shift-8 when in need.
On the meantime, you can try pasting you titles on a single document and use Ctrl-K to have them split. By default Scrivener will use the first few words of each document to give it a name.
Alternatively, you may use Ctrl-Shift-K when each line selected to have that as your document title when splitting.
Yes, indeed. Scrivener is a commercial product with a 30 day trial limit. There are costs involved for licences and implementation, and I can’t spent forever evaluating each alternative before delivering my analysis to management. However, investing time into vendor feedback, as in this case a “wishlist”, also means that the product made it into the shortlist of recommended solutions. Ok?
That work-around is good enough for now. Strangely, I had tried it before and nothing happened. Tried again after reading your post and suddenly it worked - the Binder updates and highlights the corresponding title. What I don’t understand is why it “will never happen” that it does this automatically. There is already a synchronised hook to the Inspector, so why not to the Binder?
Ctrl-K / Ctrl-Shift-K is an excellent feature for paragraphs with text. Your suggestion to use it also for titles is good, but it becomes awkward/tedious when there is a long list of them. At that point it would be really nice to just be able to paste the list of titles into the Binder and just start working with them.
Still, I found a work-around (Windows version) using the Import and Split feature:-
Save the titles (lines of text) to a file, preferably in txt format
Open the file in your preferred text editor
Search & Replace (e.g. “\n”) with
Example: search for “\n” and replace with “\n###\n” (### is a possible , choose whatever suits you)
Save file
In Binder, select destination (insertion point) for the title entries
Open the import dialog menu File | Import | Import and Split
Select file, specify in the box “Sections are separated by:” and OK
Importing the file will use the to separate each title into its own entry.
