Way to show a 'collection' against all the docs?

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I’m working on an old unfinished book, seeing if Scrivener can help me get it done.

I’ve used keywords to list all the characters in a scene, and I’m using collections to look at each character in turn, checking on physical descriptions but mostly seeing that their manner of speech remains consistent.

What I’m wondering is if there is a way to show which scenes are in a collection while the scenes are still ‘integrated’ with the entire manuscript? The idea being to check that characters aren’t ‘forgotten about’ for hundreds of pages. But I can see other uses, like if it was a murder mystery, you might want to check on the distribution of “contains clue” scenes. Or when you are ‘planting’ some item/skill that will come into play in the climax, making sure those scenes aren’t clumped together obviously. Stuff like that.

I’m picturing a way to highlight a particular set of scenes, the ones in a given collection, while looking at a display of the entire manuscript. Maybe with some special mark – a star? – while you’re looking at the corkboard? Or maybe there’s a column that could be marked in the outline view? Something like that.

2

Things that may help:

Using labels either by right clicking, inspector or gear icon then going to View > Applying label colour. You could use a label per collection, but this is limiting as each item can only have one label assigned to it.

As you are using keywords you could create a keyword for each collection, click on corkboard view and then go to View > Corkboard > Show Keyword colours. This only works in corkboard view.

3

You could also put the desired information in custom meta data and show these in a column in the outliner.
Only problem I see with all these solutions: if the scenes are of different size (as it is for me: some have a hundred words, others 3000) you have only the information that your character/clue/whatever appear in the scene, but you have no control of the amount of appearance.

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Graham nice suggestion, but unfortunately custom meta data is not available in the Windows version yet. :frowning:

5

Oh, sorry, I didn´t know! Hopefully soon!