I think I may be missing something that’s simple to figure out. I know I can set a word count target for scenes, chapters, etc., in outliner view (say 3,000 for the chapter and 500 for each of six scenes within the chapter to keep it simple), but they seem to operate independently of each other. That is, increasing word counts in scenes have no impact on the word count target meter in chapter. It would be nice if scene word counts had a cumulative impact on the chapter word count target since a chapter doesn’t exist without the scenes it contains. As I said, I’m either missing the simple way to achieve this or simply am not understanding out to use the word target feature. Anybody care to give an assist?
Actually a chapter does exist without its constituent documents. Folders and files are the same in Scrivener; they just have different icons and open in different views by default depending on your preferences. If you select the folder to see the corkboard and then click on the corkboard icon in the toolbar, you will see the underlying text.
You have two options:
- Just set the target in the folder, and not in the documents.
- Just set the sub-targets in the documents and not in the folder.
Then, just click on the folder and enter Edit Scrivenings. The target will show the cumulative count.
In the next update, a cumulative word count is also available in the outliner.
Hope that helps.
Best,
Keith