So I am a Scrivener greenie. I took a document from Word and opened it in Scrivener. I need to make a toc but all the instructions I find deal with a Scrivener document made up of folders and this is just a regular old document. So I can’t figure out how to make a clickable toc.
I even tried to pay someone to make it for me, but he’s having a hard time with the document, which I understand because when I try to open this back up in Word the document is off centered and the words go off the page. So I can’t even figure out how to put it back in Word and work with it there.
Does anyone have suggestions for me?
Sincerely, someone who has the ability to screw things up in unbelievably creative ways
Well one thing worth mentioning is that Scrivener is really designed from the ground up to work with lots of short files comprising what will be a single document when you compile (you can think of everything in that Draft folder ultimately being one single file for most basic uses, and thus the outline is more like the outline in Word, and much less like a list of .docx files in Explorer). Thus that whole thing you heard about folders and files is generally speaking, true. One needn’t actually work with folders and files, literally—that is just one common way of doing things—but even a simple sequence of files in a flat list, one for each chapter, is what I could consider to be a bare minimum (certainly if you want to make a ToC out of it). You’ll be missing out on a lot of the software can do if you try to use one single file in the Draft folder like a word processor.
To drag this to extremes for illustrative purposes, I take an almost opposite approach and use tiny sections, rarely over a few hundred words—sometimes my sections are only a paragraph long. My Draft folders also tend more into the hundreds of individual sections. The Scrivener user manual for example has close to 1,000 individual sections! Again, think of the outline in Word, for a more direct comparison than “files”. If this seems insane, consider that you can select fifty files and view and edit them as though they are one long text file using the Scrivenings view mode, with edits all going back to the original sections, wherever they may be.
The method of creating a ToC is described in chapter 22 of the user manual PDF. It’s not quite like a word processor ToC—it won’t update itself, but creating a new one is fairly simple. As you will note from the help file, it really does need you to have a bunch of sections of some sort. Each visible entry in the ToC needs to be in a different file in the Draft outline at the very least for there to be something for that line in the ToC to link back to, both for the topic name and the page number token.
Fortunately it is pretty easy to split up a long imported .doc file though. The Documents/Split/ sub-menu has a couple of useful tools for this, one of will take the current selection and use that as the title for the part that is split off into a new file. Using that tool, you can break up a 12 chapter document in 12 steps, naturally.