Hey everyone
Very new to Scrivener so forgive me if this hasn’t been covered.
I’ve gone through and created target word counts for every section of my book, but I can’t seem to work out how to get to add all of the different chapter project targets into one big manuscript target. It seems like I can manually add chapter targets for word count, but to have the entire manuscript word count target I can only enter it manually.
Does anyone know how to fix this? H
You simply use Documents > Show Project Targets and set the overall manuscript/draft target there. Toggle it on and off with cmd-shift-T. This shows you progress against the overall manuscript target (you can also set daily session targets there.)
You use the Outliner for more granular chapter and scene targets.
If you really wanted to show it in the Outliner, I think you’d have to group all your text in folder underneath the Draft/Manuscript one and give that a target — but then you’d have to compensate for that when you compile the document, and that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.
Does that help?
Hey thanks - yes that does help. I knew that you could manually set it using Show Project Targets, but the method I’m using is to work out each section and chapter’s individual word lengths, and then going from there. As I fiddle with (increase, decrease or delete) a chapter’s word length, it would have been nice to have the overall Manuscript Target increase.
The workaround you suggested could work, but I agree it’s a bit fiddly.
It seems like a bit of an oversight with the software, or am I just the only one using this method?
I think the usual method is to have an overall target to aim at (e.g. types of novels have a traditional length), then keep track of the pace and balance via the number and length of individual chapters/scenes, with a rough target for each.
But there’s obviously a huge amount of variation and no hard and fasr rules.
I agree, it is kind of an oversight that the Manuscript target can’s automatically adapt to the total target of the entire Manuscript but a folder does automatically calculate a total target from itself and all its descendants. But the reverse is also true that you can manually set a Manuscript goal that isn’t affected by the section targets you set but the same isn’t true for folder targets which always automatically get added up into total targets. Basically manually setting your milestones without always manually adapting the folder target so that the folder total target stays the same if a subdocument/-folder gets deleted is also a huge oversight on the developer’s part.
Both ways of target inputting are good but I don’t understand why the Manuscript target works one was and the folder targets work another way and you can’t chose to have both work the same way or maybe have them work in reverse. Both ways already exists, there should just be an option to apply them to either target input if you so wish to.