I’m working on my manuscript, playing with the organization of chapters and their corresponding sub-sections. It’s mostly because the word counts in each one are somewhat unbalanced.
It’s far easier to organize and pare the sections in Scrivener than it would be otherwise, but I was wondering how it could be easier. What if the word counts for each document were visible next to the file in the binder? And the cumulative word count for all documents in each folder next to the folder’s title?
That would make this process way simpler. Having a continuous tally for each chapter visible could help with all sorts of workflow issues. Possibly even put an item in the “View” menu to “Toggle Word Count in Binder.”
Again, I have no idea how hard this would be to implement.
Yes, this is definitely what the outliner is for - the “Total Word Count” column even gives the cumulative count for folders and containers as you want. It would be very difficult to read this information in the binder and would make it cluttered.
All the best,
Keith
A great thread is the one for Scrivener Screenshots - and robertdgutherie had one where he was using the Outliner as a replacement Binder. With a setup like this, you could have your wordcounts next to the folder/scenes. Takes a little setting up but I managed this:
It could never replace the binder, not without the research and other folders visible. But that’s ok: it works really well for what I’m trying to do just now.
Don’t forget to click on the icon to the left of “Manuscript” and select “Lock in Place”. That will prevent selections in the binder from replacing the outliner when you need to delve into the research section. And don’t forget the arrow icon at the bottom of the outline’s editor window, which will cause selections to automatically open in the other window.
I have also found that this configuration can’t really replace the binder. I need to at least see certain lists of files from my ‘research’ folders (character names mostly) while I write. Still, it’s great that if I need the info that only the outliner can display and I need more screen real estate, then it’s fairly easy to reconfigure scrivener to help me stay focused on a writing problem.
I’d like to suggest that a continuous word count be included although perhaps not in the binder. It is great to have the word count for each section of text but it sort of breaks concentration to have to seek out the total word count in the menu above…
Have you tried project targets? View > Statistics > Project Targets. This brings up a floating panel with progress bars, the top one for the Draft folder. The continuous word count for all text in the Draft folder is included there.
