CHAPTER UM

Part 1: Basics

Just a quick note before we begin: this tutorial assumes that you are using the default
options. If necessary, you can reset them to the defaults by clicking on the “Defaults” button in
the Options pane, available under Tools > Options…. If you haven’t made any changes to the
options, you don’t need to worry about this. Right, on with the tutorial.

When you first open a Scrivener project, by default you are presented with two panes:

1. THE BINDER
On the left, you can see a list of files: the “binder”. This is an outline view that contains three
default folders: “Draft”, “Research”, and “Trash”. You can rename these folders to whatever you
like by double-clicking on them (in some of the templates, for instance, the Draft folder has been
renamed to “Manuscript”). The binder is where you organise your project by creating a structure
and dragging and dropping your documents wherever you want.
The contents of the Draft folder represent the text fragments that will be compiled into one
long document when you export or print using File > Compile…, which is the standard way of
preparing your finished project for printing or final formatting in a dedicated word processor.
This is very much the raison d’être of Scrivener—to assemble the text of your manuscript in the
Draft folder for printing or export. (As such, the Draft folder is unique in that it can only hold
text files and folders.)
The Research folder can hold text or media files (images, PDF files, video files and so on).
You don’t have to put all research files into the Research folder, though—you can create other
folders for your support materials anywhere you want.
The Trash folder speaks for itself; whenever you delete a document it ends up there.
Documents aren’t deleted completely until you select “Empty Trash…” from the Project
menu—so there’s no way you can accidentally delete a file in Scrivener.

2. THE EDITOR
Next to the binder you have the main editor, which displays the current document. The main
editor is what you are looking at right now as you read this text document. There are several
ways to load a document in the editor, but the one you will use most often is simply selecting a
file in the binder, as you did to load this one. Scrivener allows you to create or import any
number of text documents. You can also import image, web, movies and PDF documents. To
import documents, use File > Import > Files… or simply drag the files you wish to import from
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import documents, use File > Import > Files… or simply drag the files you wish to import from
Windows Explorer into the binder of your Scrivener project.
You can change the current document by clicking on another item in the binder. Try that now
—double-click a word in this sentence to select it (you’ll see why in a moment), then click on
“Alhambra” inside the “Research” folder (you may need to expand the Research folder by
clicking on the triangle or [+] sign in Windows XP next to it, first) and then return here (“Step
1: Beginnings”). See how the selection that you created before is saved and scrolled to
automatically? Scrivener always remembers your cursor position and selection, even between
sessions. Use this way of “bookmarking your spot” to your advantage as you progress through
the tutorial.

So now you know that this area can be used to view different types of documents, not just
text.

Let’s try switching between documents again. You see the document on the left beneath this
one, the one entitled “Step 2: Header View”? Click on it now.

You have just switched between documents. You might use different documents for different
chapters, different scenes, different ideas, articles, characters, whatever you want. There are
other ways of switching between documents, too. Another one you will use frequently is the
header view. See that bar at the top of the text, the one that has the arrows on the left of it and
says “Step 2: Header View” in it? Well, that is the header view (which is sometimes also referred
to as the “header bar”). You can rename the document by clicking into the title of the header
view, and there are several options available in a menu if you click on the icon next to the title.
The arrows on the left of the header view that point left and right are the history navigation
buttons and work much like web browser navigation arrows—they allow you to step back and
forth through the documents you have had open in the editor. The white up and down arrows on
the right of the header bar step through the contents of the binder sequentially. To see the
difference, try the following:
1. Click on the “Alhambra” image document in the Research folder again and then click on
the left arrow in the header view. You will be returned to this document, because this was
the one you had open last.
2. Click on the right arrow and you will be returned to the “Alhambra” image document
again. (Make sure you come back here afterwards though!)
3. Now, with this document open, click on the down arrow on the right and then click on
the up arrow again to return here. Note how the down arrow takes you to the next
document in the binder, whereas the right arrow takes you to the next document in the
navigation history. If you prefer the keyboard, you can use Alt-Shift-UpArrow and
DownArrow to do the same.
4. If you click on the little icon next to the title of this document in the header bar, you’ll
find some handy commands you can use. One of these is a “Go To” menu. This arranges
the contents of your binder into a series of sub-menus. You can thus easily jump
anywhere in the Binder, even if it is hidden.
While we’re here, note that the selection highlight in the binder does not necessarily follow
what is being displayed in the main editor—if you change the contents of the editor using the
history buttons, for instance, the selection in the binder will not change. You can thus navigate

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history buttons, for instance, the selection in the binder will not change. You can thus navigate

around using the header view without losing track of the original document on which you were
working in the binder.

Try using the “Go To” menu in the header bar icon menu to find and navigate to “Step 3:
Footer View”. You’ll need to first select the Draft sub-menu, and then “Part 1: Basics”…

If you ever find that after navigating through multiple documents you are not sure where the
current document is located in the binder, you can simply use View > Reveal in Binder
(Ctrl+Shift+8) to force the binder to show you where you are. Right now, since you used a menu
to get here, the Binder isn’t highlighting what you are looking at. Try using the shortcut or menu
command to focus the binder selection on Step 3. This is especially useful if the item you are
looking to locate is buried beneath many sub-folders and not even visible.

Okay, so let’s get familiar with the editor. At the bottom of the window, you can see a grey
bar containing a pop-up button with a percentage in it (135% by default) and a live word and
character count. This is the “footer view”. Try typing something in the yellow area below:

Done that? You will see that the word and character count in the footer view changes as you
type. Now try changing the percentage in the drop-down menu at the bottom, too (click on it and
select a new percentage)—you will see that you can make the text bigger or smaller (useful for
tired eyes). Feel free to set that to a comfortable level for the remainder of this tutorial.

SCRIPTWRITING MODE
The footer view will change depending on what you are viewing inside the document. For
instance, if you are typing a script (such as a movie screenplay), the footer view will give you
information on the various script elements. Try selecting Format > Scriptwriting > Script
Mode - Screenplay from the main menu now. You will see another pop-up menu appear on the
right saying “General Text” (this just means that the currently selected text isn’t recognised as a
part of a screenplay). Click into the text on the line below:
CLICK INTO THIS TEXT.

Now try selecting different elements from the pop-up menu on the right of the footer view.
You will see that the above text automatically gets reformatted to the script element you
selected, and the footer view will show what will happen if you press the tab or enter keys
(which will move you to the next script element). Note that you can hit Ctrl+\ to bring up that
menu automatically and then hit one of the keys specified in the menu to select an element
without taking your hands off the keyboard.
Scriptwriting mode is saved on a document-by-document basis, so you can switch between
documents that use script formatting and regular text documents. The icons of documents in the
binder that use scriptwriting mode are yellow and have a 3-hole punch along the left side, so that
you can easily tell them apart from other text documents.
Right, let’s return to normal prose mode now. Select Format > Scriptwriting > Script
Mode - Screenplay (Ctrl-4) again to de-select screenplay mode.

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 OTHER FILES
For PDF files, the footer view allows you to navigate between the pages. Click on
“spacewalk_info” in the Research folder to test this out, and then come back here by clicking on
the “back” arrow in the header view.

All good so far, I hope. Now let’s familiarise ourselves with some other basic features. Click
on “Step 4: Full Screen” in the binder.

Full screen is a very nice feature for blocking everything else out while you write. I’m not
going to pretend it’s innovative or anything—I think Blue-Tec (now called The Soulmen), the
creators of Ulysses, were the first to implement something like this for a text editor—but it is
very handy. Either hit F11 or click on “Full Screen” in the toolbar above – do it now!

You should now be in full screen mode—it’s just you and your text. Some things you need to
know about full screen mode:

● Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen. You will see that a control panel appears.
From here you can change the text scale, set the position and width of the “paper” (the
text column), or its height by holding down the Alt key and using the alternate slider, and
view the word and character counts of the document. There are also buttons for
displaying the Keywords and Inspector (we won’t go into that right now, though, as we
have yet to talk about keywords and notes—come back and try them out once you’ve
gone through the rest of the tutorial) and a Go To menu so you can switch documents
without leaving full screen. On the far right, you’ll find a slider for setting how
transparent the background is on either side of the paper as well as a button for exiting
full screen. You can also hit F11 or the Escape key to exit full screen mode.
● You can only enter full screen mode for text documents.
● By default, full screen uses “typewriter” scrolling (another Ulysses first, I believe). This
simply means that as you type, the text will remain in the centre of the screen vertically
so that you don’t have to stare at the bottom of the screen all the time. You can toggle
this on and off via the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+G,T (which means you would press Ctrl-
G and then let go of both keys and quickly follow with the T key). If you’d rather never
use it, you can set its default state to off in Tools > Options…, under the Editor tab.
● You can customise the look of full screen mode. You can use the Appearance pane of the
Options to change the background colours and you can change the colour of the text in

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 ●
Options to change the background colours and you can change the colour of the text in
full screen mode (so you could set it up to have a retro green-text-on-black-background
look, for instance).

Okay, let’s move on to “Step 5: The Inspector” while still in full screen mode. To do so,
move the mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen and click on the “Go To” icon so that the
menu appears. Then, choose Draft > Part 1: Basics > Step 5: The Inspector.

CHAPTER DOIS
Step 5: The Inspector

The first thing you will notice is the index card at the top. This appears in the Notes,
References and Keywords panes of the inspector (but not in the Snapshots and Footnotes &
Comments panes which require more space). The index card is an important concept in
Scrivener. You can type a synopsis of your document into the body of the index card (note the
header of the index card can be used to rename the document, too). One of the core ideas behind
Scrivener is that every document (or chunk of text, or image, or whatever) is associated with a
synopsis, which is represented in the inspector by the index card. You can then view these
synopses in different ways (which we will come to later) which will make outlining and
organising your work easier. The best way to understand this is to imagine that each document in
Scrivener is a sheet of paper that has an index card clipped to it containing a summary of the
document’s contents, which can then be viewed alongside other index cards to get an overview
of the whole.
You can auto-generate a synopsis by clicking on the button in the top-right of the
inspector: if any text is selected in the editor, it will be copied into the synopsis; if no text is
selected, the first few lines of text will be used.
You can also display an image in this area if you want. To do so, just click on the icon of the
index card with two arrows next to it in the header at the top of the inspector and choose the
image icon. The synopsis will be replaced by a blank area containing the text, “Drag in an
image.” You can then drag image files from the binder or from Windows Explorer into this area.
(If an image is selected for a document in the synopsis area of the inspector, it will also be used
to represent the document on the corkboard instead of the synopsis text—we will come to the
corkboard a little later.) Try dragging “Alhambra” from the Research folder in the binder and
dropping it into the dark grey area that says “Drag an image file”. See how the original file stays
where it is? The image has been copied into the index card, not moved.
So that’s the index card. Below the index card are other tools to help you organise your
work, starting with the General pane. Note that the Synopsis and General panes can be collapsed
by clicking on the disclosure triangle in their respective header bars.

Please click on “5b: Meta-Data”.

GENERAL META-DATA

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 The General Meta-Data pane contains several meta-data elements:
Label and Status
Label and status are just arbitrary tags you can assign to your document. You can set up the
project labels and status list via Project > Meta-Data Settings… You might, for instance,
rename “Label” to “POV” (for Point of View) and use it to hold the name of the point-of-view
character for each document. This way, you could easily run a search on all chapters that have a
particular character as the protagonist by searching on label only (don’t worry, we’ll get into the
details of how to do that later). Status works much the same, except that it is meant to keep track
of the state of the document—for instance, “Finished”, “To do”, “A mess” and so forth—
although you can rename it and use it for something completely different, should you so wish. If
you change the titles for these meta-data types, the General Meta-Data section will show your
custom title instead of the default “Label” and “Status”.
Created/Modified Date
Switch between the created and modified date by clicking on the arrows next to where it
says “Created:” or “Modified:”. No surprises here—as you would expect, the created date holds
the date and time the document was first created and the modified date holds the date and time
the document was last modified and saved.
Include in Compile, Page Break Before and Compile As-Is
These options affect how the document is compiled when you come to export or print the
draft (which we will come to later). They only have any meaning if the document is contained
inside the Draft folder. They are mostly self-explanatory: “Include in Compile” specifies
whether the document should be included in or omitted from the draft when exported or printed,
and is thus useful for such things as chapter notes or old revisions of a section; “Page Break
Before” specifies whether the document should have a page break before it (useful if it marks
the beginning of a chapter, for instance); “Compile As-Is” tells the compilation process not to
change the formatting or insert a title for this particular document, no matter what the Compile
settings are. In most cases these are tools for exceptional cases, and you won’t need to bother
with them.
You can view all meta-data in columns in the outliner view, too (which is covered in Part 2).

Next, let’s look at the “Notes” pane.

At the bottom of the inspector is the notes area, where you can jot down anything you want
that will help you with your document. If you click in the notes header bar (where it says
“Document Notes”), you can flip between Document Notes and Project Notes. As you would
imagine, document notes are specific to each document and will change depending on the
document you are viewing in the current editor, whereas project notes can be viewed from any
document (project notes can also be seen in the inspector when you select one of the special root
folders—Draft, Research and Trash—which have no associated meta-data or synopses).

Please click on “5d: References” in the binder.

Click on the next button in the inspector footer bar, the one with the picture of several book
spines on it. This switches to the “References” pane (the index card and meta-data area will
remain where they are, only the notes will disappear to be replaced by a list of references). The

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remain where they are, only the notes will disappear to be replaced by a list of references). The

references pane allows you to store references to other documents within the project, on your
hard-disk or on the Internet.

Click where indicated to (1) add a new reference or (2) remove the selected reference.

By clicking on the “+” button, you can choose to add a reference to a file on disk or you can
select a document inside the project. You can also drag documents from within the project you
are working in,Windows Explorer, or the URL from a browser address field, into the references
table. Double-clicking on the icon of a reference will open it: external references open in their
default application; internal references open inside Scrivener. Note that, as with notes, you can
store references at the document or project level—click on the bar where it says “Document
References” to flip between Document References (which are specific to the current document)
and Project References (which can be viewed from any document).
If you tried double-clicking on the “Step 6” icon, you will have seen the split editor feature
in action. Before continuing, close the split editor by using the View > Layout > No Split menu
command. Make sure the blue header bar is on this document when you do so, otherwise you’ll
end up in Step 6 from the other split!

Next click on the key button at the bottom of the inspector to view the keywords pane and
then move on to “5e: Keywords”.

As well as Label and Status, you can also assign keywords to your documents. Keywords are
useful for adding arbitrary tags to documents that you can use when searching. So, for instance,
you could add keywords for characters that occur in a scene, the location a scene takes place, the
theme, authors referenced, or anything else (or you can just ignore keywords completely). You
can add keywords by clicking on the “+” button. You can also assign keywords via the Project
Keywords dialogue. Open that now by clicking on the “Keywords” button in the toolbar (the
black box with the key inside it) or Ctrl-Shift-O.

A floating window (that means you can keep it open while you work, and it will always
“float” on top of the other windows) will appear. This shows all of the keywords that you have
created or assigned to documents so far. You can also create keywords inside this window and

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created or assigned to documents so far. You can also create keywords inside this window and
drag them to the keywords table in the Inspector. You can change the colour associated with a
keyword by double-clicking on the colour chip in the Project Keywords window. (Another way
of assigning keywords is by dragging them onto documents in the binder or the outliner and
corkboard views that we will look at later. You can assign keywords to multiple documents at
once by selecting the documents in the binder and then dragging the keywords from the
Keywords dialogue onto the selection).
Try dragging the keyword entitled “Assign this one” to the keywords table.
You can assign multiple keywords at once. To see this in action, click on the triangle next to
“Characters” in the floating Keywords dialogue to reveal the names of some characters. Hold
down the “Ctrl” key to select multiple keywords, then drag all of the selected keywords into the
inspector keyword table. Note how all the selected keywords are added.
A quick way of searching for documents that have been assigned particular keywords is to
select the keywords you want to search for in the Project Keywords dialogue and then click on
the “Search” button at the bottom. Try that now, with the “Themes” keyword. The binder list to
the left will be replaced by a search result list. Only this one document should be listed. To leave
the search result list, click the “X” button in the lower right-hand corner of the binder sidebar.
We’ll learn more about searching later.

You can close the Project Keywords window now, either toggling it with the toolbar button,
Ctrl-Shift-O or clicking the “X” button in the corner of the window.
Next, on to one of Scrivener’s most useful features for editing documents: “Snapshots”.

As a writer, the chances are that you will on occasion be nervous about committing changes
to your text. This is what the “Snapshots” feature is for. Before embarking on the editing of a
document, you can click on “Take Snapshot” (Ctrl+5) in the Documents > Snapshots menu.
You will hear the sound of a camera shutter which indicates that the snapshot has been taken.
Let’s try that now…
Once you have taken a snapshot, you can edit your document safe in the knowledge that you
can return to the old version any time you so wish. Click on the “Snapshots” button (the one
with the picture of a camera on it) in the inspector footer bar to see what I mean (you can also
switch directly to the Snapshots pane and have the inspector open if necessary by going to
Documents > Snapshots > Show Snapshots). The inspector now shows a list of snapshots at
the top, which should consist of the one you took and one I took while writing the first version
of this tutorial back in 2006. Clicking on a snapshot in the list reveals its text in the lower part of
the inspector. You can restore an older version of your text by selecting the version you want
from the list and then clicking on “Roll Back” at the top (at which point, you will be given the
option of taking another snapshot of your current version, just in case you forgot).
Snapshots are very useful for keeping old versions of your text around and for checking what
you have changed.

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 On to the last pane, “Comments & Footnotes”!

Now we’ll look at the “Comments & Footnotes” pane—don’t worry about clicking on the
button in the inspector footer bar just yet though (for your reference, though, the “Comments &
Footnotes” button is the one with the “n.” inside a square speech bubble).
Comments and footnotes in Scrivener work a little like comments in Word or OpenOffice,
but they’re not exactly the same. Let’s take a look at them.
For a start, click on the yellow highlighted text in the sentence below:

This sentence has a comment attached.

Note how the inspector automatically switches to the Comments & Footnotes pane, and the
comment associated with the text gets highlighted.
Next, click on the grey footnote in the inspector, directly below the highlighted comment.

This sentence has a footnote attached.1

See how clicking on the note in the inspector automatically selects the text associated with it
in the main editor?
If you click on a note in the inspector, the editor will automatically scroll to the position in
the text where the note has been placed. This allows you to use the comments and footnotes to
navigate the text, so that they act like bookmarks in a way, too. Try scrolling to the bottom of
this document, and then clicking the comment to return to the spot where it is anchored.

ADDING COMMENTS AND FOOTNOTES

Let’s try adding some comments and footnotes. There are a couple of ways of doing this.
First, select some of the text in the following sentence:

Select some of the text in this sentence.

Once you’ve selected a word or two in the above sentence, either click on the “+” button in
the top “Comments & Footnotes” bar in the inspector or use the Format > Comment menu
command. A new comment will be created in the inspector and it will be selected ready for
editing—add some text. Once you’ve finished typing in the comment, tap the Esc key to return
to the editor.
Alternatively, you can just click into or after a word to add a comment or footnote to it. This
time, just click into the word “commented” below so that the blinking insertion point (or caret)
is somewhere inside it:

This sentence will be commented.

Again, create a comment using your preferred method. Note how the whole word
“commented” gets a comment associated with it.
Let’s try it with a footnote too. This time, place the cursor right at the end of this sentence,

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 Let’s try it with a footnote too. This time, place the cursor right at the end of this sentence,

after the full stop, then click and drag to select the word “printed”:

This sentence will have a footnote after it when exported or printed.

This time, click on the “+fn” button in the inspector (note that you can add icons for
“Footnote” and “Comment” to the Format Bar by using Tools > Customize Toolbar…).
Note how the footnote gets attached to the word “printed”, including the full stop. It
generally doesn’t matter where you attach comments, because they are usually for your own (or
collaborators’) reference only, but with footnotes you should always ensure that the footnote link
(the grey highlight) ends at exactly the place you want the footnote number to appear when
printed or exported. Since the footnote highlight ends right after the full stop, that means the
footnote number will be inserted there, which is usually what you will want.

CHANGING THE COLOUR OF COMMENTS

You can change the colour of comments by right-clicking on a comment in the inspector. The
contextual menu offers a choice of default colours, or you can open the colour chooser to choose
a custom colour with “More…”. You cannot change the colour of footnotes, which use a single
colour to differentiate them from comments, although you can choose the background colour for
all footnotes in the “Appearance” panel of Options.
The contextual menu also allows you to convert comments to footnotes and vice versa, and
to revert comments or footnotes to their default formatting (you can set the default fonts in the
“Appearance” Options panel).
Comments and footnotes are thus tucked away in the inspector until you need them. When
you come to export or print—which we’ll come to later—you have a lot of control over how
comments and footnotes get included in the document. For instance, you could have all
comments removed but footnotes included as proper footnotes, or you could have comments
exported as footnotes and footnotes exported as endnotes. But if that sounds complicated, it’s not
something you need to worry about right now—just know that if you want to make notes on
your document, or add footnotes, this is one way to do it.

Right, on to “Step 6: End of Part One”!

This brings us to the end of Part 1 of the tutorial. In the next section you will learn about
different ways of viewing and organising the documents in your Scrivener project.
Folders (not just folders, but we’ll come to that shortly) can be viewed using several “view
modes”, but for now all you need to know is that when you click on “Part 2”, you will initially
see a corkboard, but in fact what you want to see is the text of the folder document. This will
make more sense in a minute!
So after you click on “Part 2: Organisation”, take a look at the “Group Mode” segmented
control in the toolbar and ensure that all view modes are turned off. The control should look like
this (note how nothing is selected):

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 If one of the segments is yellow, just click on the selected segment to turn it off. This will
leave you with just the text of “Part 2” in the editor, ready to read.

Go ahead and try that now.

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 CHAPTER TRÊS
Part 2: Organisation

Scrivener’s editor has four modes—four different ways of viewing your work—and learning
how and when to switch between them will make your Scrivener experience much more
comfortable. The four modes are as follows:

1. Single Document Mode

In this mode, the editor shows the contents of a single document, whether it’s a text
document, a folder, an image, a PDF file or whatever. The editor is in single document mode
right now since we used it to view the text of the “Part 2: Organisation” folder.

2. Corkboard Mode
In corkboard mode, the editor shows the subdocuments of the current document as index
cards on a corkboard. Let’s take a look at how that works right now:

a) Try clicking on the “Part 2: Organisation” folder in the binder, and then click on the image
of the corkboard in the toolbar (the one in the middle of the group of three View Group Mode
icons) so that it is selected:

Once you’ve taken a look at the corkboard, return here. See how the subdocuments of the
folder you had selected appeared as index cards? If you open the inspector right now and select
the “Notes” pane, you will see the index card associated with this document—which you will
have seen on the corkboard, because this document is a subdocument of the “Part 2:
Organisation” folder.

b) Now—well, after you’ve read this bit, so you know how to get back—click on the
corkboard icon again, while viewing this document. You will see that the corkboard is blank.
This is because this document (“Step 7: Changing Editor Views”) doesn’t have any
subdocuments—but it could. After you’ve seen the blank corkboard, click on the text icon to the
left of the corkboard icon in the toolbar icon to see the text of the document again:

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 3. Outliner Mode
Outliner mode is much like the corkboard mode, allowing you to see the subdocuments of
the current document, except that it shows them as rows and allows you to view various columns
of information and allows you to view subdocuments of subdocuments to any depth. Try
repeating everything you did for the corkboard mode above, but this time instead of choosing
the corkboard icon, click the outliner icon on the right (and remember to come back here
afterwards):

4. “Scrivenings” Mode
“Scrivenings” is the term for Scrivener’s combined text mode, and it is one of Scrivener’s
coolest features. It allows you to view or edit multiple text documents as a composite—as
though they were one long document. Scrivenings mode is available when there are multiple
documents available to view as one. If you look at the “View Mode” control in the toolbar at the
moment, you will see that the left-most icon shows a single sheet of paper. This indicates that
the composite text mode is not available here, because you are viewing a single document that
has no subdocuments. So, let’s look at one that does.
After reading this part, once more click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder. When you do
so, you will notice that the “View Mode” icon in the toolbar changes:

View Mode icon (1) changes when Scrivenings mode is available for the selection (2).

(You will notice that when you select the “Part 2” folder again, it returns to outliner mode—
this is because Scrivener remembers which mode you last used to view a group, and will
automatically use it for viewing groups until you change it again.)
The single text icon on the left has now changed into a stack of paper. This means that it is
possible to enter Scrivenings mode. To do so, you simply click on the button with the icon of the
stack of papers. Try that with the “Part 2” folder now, and after selecting the stack of papers icon
scroll all the way down to the bottom of the editor, then return here by clicking back on “Step 7”
in the binder.
Done that? You should have seen that the text from all the various subdocuments of the “Part
2” folder—including this one—were combined into one long document, with dividers between
them. You could have edited the text, and your changes would have automatically been applied
to all of the individual files you altered.

What To Remember When Switching Views

You’ve now switched between all the main views. The main thing to remember is that when
13
 You’ve now switched between all the main views. The main thing to remember is that when
you are viewing a single document that has no subdocuments, there are only three view modes
available—because you can’t enter Scrivenings (composite text) mode when viewing only a
single document. In this case, the left-most icon is a single sheet of text. You click on the mode
you want to view—single document mode, corkboard mode, or outliner mode.
When you are viewing a folder or a document that has subdocuments, though, there are four
ways of viewing the editor available—the single document (disregarding the content of any
children items), corkboard and outliner mode, and also Scrivenings mode. You can return to
single document mode by de-selecting all of the segments of the Group Mode control—that is,
click on the one that is selected to de-select it—just as you did at the end of Step 6 to view the
text of the “Part 2” folder.
You can also switch between view modes using the top three items in the View menu, or
using the Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+3 keyboard shortcuts.

I know, I know—now you really do need that cup of tea, and probably another biscuit too.
Once you’re done, we’ll take a look at each of these view modes in more detail.

I know, I promised, but before delving further into the view modes, let’s pause to check out
another important feature of Scrivener that will save us from having to jump around so much
between folders and instructions. The chances are that from time to time you are going to want
to split the editor so that you can view two parts of the same document, or two entirely different
documents, alongside one another. So let’s do that now. Go to View > Layout > Split
Horizontally. Alternatively, click on the button in the right of the header view above (the square
with the horizontal line through its middle):

Vertical and horizontal split buttons.

Suddenly, this document is displayed in two panes, which is great when you need to refer
back to an earlier place in the file, but don’t want to lose the ability to keep typing in the current
location. Note that through the Layout menu, you can also choose a Vertical Split, No Split to
get rid of the split altogether, or to hide the header and footer views for the current document
view.
All well and good, but we don’t want to be limited to viewing only one document at a time,
do we? We can do that in any word processor worth its salt (whatever that means), after all. And
naturally, we’re not. Click on any document in the binder, and it will be shown in the editor that
currently has the focus. You can tell which editor currently has the focus because when there is a
split, the header bar of the focused editor turns blue.
In the binder, click “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” from inside the “Research” folder.
“ThisIsBuzzAldrin” is an audio file, so you won’t see much other than a media control bar in the
lower part of the top pane (actually, that audio file is the beginning of the coolest phone message
I ever picked up; sadly, the message was not for me).
Now you can play the audio file in the top pane whilst typing in this bottom pane. You can
control the media file using the keyboard shortcuts defined in the View > Media menu.
Ctrl+Enter will play or pause the file, for instance—without your having to click outside of this

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Ctrl+Enter will play or pause the file, for instance—without your having to click outside of this
text. These shortcuts are very useful for transcription work, or for referring to a video file while
writing.
But of course, you can use the split view to view any two documents in Scrivener alongside
one another. The snazziness of this feature should immediately be apparent: you can refer to
another text, PDF, image or video document in one view while typing in another. You could hide
the toolbar, the header and footer views and the binder and just have the two documents side-by-
side while you work.

Make sure this bottom pane has the focus (click in it if you are not sure) so that its header
view is blue, and click on “Step 9” so that it opens here.

The corkboard is one of Scrivener’s most distinctive structural tools, so let’s look at that
now.

Basic Usage
The corkboard shows the immediate subdocuments of the selected document. To see what I
mean, click into the top editor to give it the focus (it should still be showing the
“ThisIsBuzzAldrin” media file; if so, click anywhere in the grey area—so that the header bar of
the top editor turns blue. Once the top editor has the focus, click on the “Draft” folder in the
binder, and ensure that the capsule “Group Mode” control in the toolbar has the corkboard
selected.
Note how the corkboard in the top editor now shows the folders, “Part 1” through to “Part
5”, represented as index cards. If you look in the binder, you will notice that these five folders
are the immediate subdocuments (or “children”) of the Draft folder—that is, they are only
indented one level from the Draft folder. The corkboard thus allows you to concentrate on
individual levels of your structure.
Next, in the corkboard itself, double-click on the folder icon in the top-left of the second
card, which is titled “Part 2: Organisation”. This will drill down to show the contents of the “Part
2” folder represented as index cards. Each card shows the title of the document and a synopsis
area that can be used to remind you of the content of the document or to note what you intend to
write in the document later. You can edit the synopsis or title by double-clicking into a card, and
you can drag the cards around (and into the binder) to reorder your documents.
If the inspector is open while the corkboard (or outliner) is open, it will show information for
the currently selected card.
You can change the corkboard settings—the number of cards that get drawn across, their
width and so on—by clicking on the button with the image of four index cards in it in the right
of the footer bar beneath the corkboard:

15
 (Incidentally, if you don’t like the corkboard background, you can change it to a colour or
texture of your choice in the Corkboard tab of the Tools > Options. You can also change the
way the cards look, to get rid of the rounded corners to make them look more like real index
cards, or switch to virtual pins instead of corner markers for labels, which we will turn on
shortly.)

Controlling The Other Editor From The Corkboard

Note the button containing the two arrows facing in opposite directions in the corkboard
footer bar:

This is the “Auto-Load Button”. Click on it now, and note that the button stays depressed,
indicating it is active. When this button is on, selecting documents in the corkboard (or outliner)
will open them in the other editor if there is a split. Try clicking on the “Step 7” card, then on the
“Step 8” card, and then on the “Step 9” card (which should bring you back here).
See how clicking on the cards opened the documents associated with them in this editor?
That’s a useful trick, as it means you can hide the binder and use the corkboard or outliner to
navigate if you want to, or just use the corkboard or outliner as secondary navigation tools.
Click on the Auto-Load button again to toggle the feature off, then try clicking on the cards
in the corkboard once more—this time nothing will happen, because the button has been
deselected.

View Options
Go to View > Corkboard Options > Show Pins. The result will depend on the look you
have chosen for the label indicator in the corkboard Options. If you are using the default corner
mark look, then each card that has a label associated with it will now have a colour chip in its

16
mark look, then each card that has a label associated with it will now have a colour chip in its

top-right corner; if you are using the pin look, then each index card will now display a pin
holding it in place that is the colour of the label associated with the document. Alternatively, you
can select View > Use Label Color In > Index Cards to tint the actual cards with the colour of
the label. You can also select Show Stamps via View > Corkboard Options, which places a
diagonal stamp on the cards—this stamp shows the status associated with the document
represented by the index card.
Right-clicking on an index card brings up a contextual menu that allows you to change the
label (and thus the colour of the pin) and status—you can use the contextual menu to assign a
label or status to multiple cards, too, by selecting all the cards you wish to affect before Control-
clicking on one of them.
There are other viewing options available in the View > Corkboard Options menu, but we
won’t cover them here (though they are all explained in the Help file, of course).
One more thing to note, before we move on, is that graphics files get displayed on the
corkboard as pictures. Click in the corkboard above to ensure it has the focus, and then click on
the “Research” folder to see what I mean.
Okay, we covered a lot there! Remember that you don’t have to use the features that don’t
appeal to you. Not all writers like corkboards—some Scrivener users never touch the corkboard
at all, preferring the outliner, which we’ll come to next.

When you’re ready then—after a stretch of the legs, a glass of wine, a good curse at the
prolixity of this tutorial’s author, whichever helps—let’s move on to “Step 10” and look at the
outliner in more depth. Don’t forget to click into this split before switching documents!

The binder is a very useful organisational tool, but one of the key concepts behind Scrivener
is the linking of synopses to documents—and the binder does not show synopses (well, actually,
it does show them in tool tips if you hover the mouse over items there, but the binder is more
intended as a table of contents). The corkboard, as we have seen, is a good way of viewing and
editing the synopses of multiple documents, but not everyone likes corkboards and besides, the
corkboard only shows one level of a group’s subdocuments at a time. This is where the outliner
comes in: it provides a way of structuring multiple levels of your project at the same time as
seeing much of the data associated with your documents.
Click into the upper pane (which should still show the corkboard) so that it receives the
focus (its header bar will turn blue), and then click on the “Draft” folder in the binder. Next,
select the “Outliner” segment of the “Group Mode” capsule in the toolbar:

The upper view will now have turned into an outliner, showing all of the items contained
inside the Draft (because that is what we selected in the binder). Click on a disclosure triangle
next to one of the folders to reveal the next level of subdocuments (or Alt-click on a disclosure
triangle to open all subfolders inside the folder too, all the way down to the bottom of the
hierarchy).
Next, with the outliner still focused, click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder. The
outliner will now show only the subdocuments of the “Part 2” folder.
Choose which columns appear by clicking on the button in the top-right of the outliner title
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 Choose which columns appear by clicking on the button in the top-right of the outliner title
bar, or via the View > Outliner Columns menu.

The outliner allows you to edit the titles and synopses of various documents, assign the label
or status, set the “Include in Compile”, “Page Break Before” and “Compile As-Is” flags and
reorganise documents by dragging them around. You can also view various other meta-data,
such as the word and character counts of documents.
By default, when you drag items around you can drop them on other items as well as
between them (dropping “on” places the dropped document inside the document it was dropped
on, below the other subdocuments). You can also use the Ctrl+Arrow Keys (up, down, left and
right) to move documents around–this can be useful when you want a little more accuracy. You
can also use these same shortcut keys in the Binder.

We can get rid of the split now. To do so, click on the button in the right of the header bar for
this editor:

Once you’ve done that, go to Step 11.

Let’s take a closer look at “Scrivenings” mode. The whole point of Scrivener is to make
working on a long text easier by allowing you to break it up into smaller pieces, but you will
often want to see how those smaller pieces fit into the greater whole. This is what Scrivenings
mode lets you do.
There are two ways of entering Scrivenings mode:
1. You can select a folder or container in the binder that contains text subdocuments, and
use Scrivenings mode to view all of the documents inside the folder (including the
folder itself, if it has text associated with it) as though they were one long document.
2. You can select arbitrary documents in the binder and view them as though they were a
single document.
We already did (1) in Step 7, so let’s try viewing arbitrary documents this time. Once you’ve
finished reading this paragraph, click on “START HERE” at the top of the binder and then,
holding down the Ctrl key, click on “Step 7: Changing Editor Views” and “Step 11:
Scrivenings”, so that all three documents get selected. Once that’s done, ensure that the stack of
papers is selected in the “Group Mode” control in the toolbar, and then scroll down towards the
bottom of the text that gets loaded into this editor and look for the pink highlighting below—do
that now.

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 Back here yet?

Do you see what just happened? “Scrivenings” temporarily combines the selected documents
into a single text. You can select non-contiguous documents or you can choose to view and edit
the contents of a folder or group. If you were writing a novel, you could therefore write each
scene of a chapter in isolation and then view and edit the whole chapter as though it were a
single document using Scrivenings; or you might run a search on a particular character and view
the results as one long text so that you can see how the storyline for that character pans out in
isolation.
So that you can see where one document ends and the next begins, there is a horizontal
dashed dividing line between sections.
The Inspector displays information about the chunk of text you are currently editing, so if
you lose your place you can always open that and check the index card to see where you are.
An important point to note about Scrivenings is that you cannot make textual edits across the
individual document boundaries, so if you try to select a range of text that spans more than one
document block and try to edit it, you will not be able to. However within each section, every
edit you make will be automatically saved into the original document.

Now it’s time to click on “Step 12”...

At the risk of telling you the blindingly obvious, project search allows you to search for
documents inside your project that contain a particular word, phrase, label, keyword and
suchlike. Just click in the search field on the right-hand side of the toolbar and type the phrase
you want to search for.

Project Search Tip

When clicked on, the downwards-pointing triangle next to the magnifying glass in
the search field brings up a menu that allows you to modify the search options. When
the search field is left blank, a summary of the more important options will be
provided for your convenience. Notice that right now it says “Keywords (Exact
Phrase)”. That's because we were testing the search function with project keywords a
little earlier.

Go ahead and change that to "All", using the magnifying glass menu. Now click in the
search field now and type “collection”.
Note how the binder is replaced by a darker coloured “Search Results” list. This is a list of
documents that contain the word “collection” somewhere within them. Also note that the search
term—in this case “collection”—is now highlighted in yellow in the current document wherever
it appears. You can click on the documents in the search results list too, and easily see at a
glance where the term you searched for is in the document. For longer documents, just click into
them in the editor and go to Edit > Find > Find… (or hit Ctrl-F) to bring up the Find panel,
which can be used to search within the documents themselves. To get rid of the search results
list, you can click on the “close” button on the right of the search field:

19
 Or on the button in the footer bar of the sidebar:

Do so now, and then move on to “Step 13: Collections”.

Are you still with us? We’re most of the way there, I promise.
We’re going to look at a feature called “Collections” next. Collections provide a way of
keeping lists of documents that have nothing to do with their binder order. The easiest way to
understand what I mean is to create a collection, so let’s do that now.
First, we’re going to be doing a lot of clicking around in the sidebar, but we don’t want to
keep losing our spot, so let’s lock the editor in place. Click on the icon in the editor’s header
view to bring up the header bar menu, and click on “Lock in Place”:

The header bar will turn dark pink. This indicates that the editor is now “locked”, which
means that clicks in the binder will have no effect. Try clicking on different documents in the
binder to see what I mean—they will no longer get loaded into the editor when selected as they
normally do. This useful ability can be toggled with Ctrl-Shift-L, too.

Creating an Arbitrary Collection

Click on the “Collections” button on the left-hand side of the toolbar.

20
 You will see an extra area appear at the top of the binder with a blue and purple tab in it,
entitled “Binder” and “Search Results”. Try clicking on the “Search Results” tab.

See what happened? The last search you ran gets run again, and its results appear where the
binder was; the word you search for will even be highlighted again in this window. This will
even be saved in between sessions, and we’ll soon learn how you can save more than one search
permanently as tabs.
Click on the “Binder” tab to return to the binder.
Now hold down the Ctrl key and click on several documents in the binder to select them.
Once you have selected five or six—it doesn’t matter which ones; they can even be from the
Research folder or elsewhere—click on the “+” button in “Collections” bar at the very top of the
binder:

The binder will temporarily disappear, to be replaced by a flat list showing only the
documents you selected. You haven’t moved those documents, though—they are all still in their
rightful places in the binder. You’ve just created a collection (more specifically, an arbitrary
collection) and when you created it, the selected documents were automatically added to it. To
see what I mean right-click on one of the documents in the collection list and select “Reveal in
Binder” from the View menu. This will show you where the document is located in the binder.
Click back on the collection tab once you’ve tried this, to return to the collection.
You can rename the collection to anything you want, and you can change its colour by
double-clicking on its colour chip:

21
 Double-click where indicated to (1) rename or (2) change the colour of the collection.

Go ahead and try changing the title and colour. You can also drag and drop tabs amongst one
another to change their order.
Let’s add some more documents to the collection. Click back on the Binder tab and select
some different documents. Once you’ve selected some, drag and drop them onto your collection
tab. You will see that the documents you dragged onto the tab are now in the collection too.
You can drag and drop the documents in the collection list to arrange them into any order
you want. If we unlocked this editor, clicking on documents in the collection would open them
in the editor, just as happens when selecting documents in the binder. To remove items from the
list, simply select them and press Shift-Del. Note that this will not delete the original item, it
will merely remove it from this list.
Collections can be used for whatever you like. You might, for instance, use them to gather
together documents you need to do more work on, removing them as you are satisfied with
them. You might use a collection to experiment with the order of documents before committing
to the arrangement. Once you were happy with the arrangement, you could select all the
documents, right-click on them, and use Move To from the contextual menu to move them all to
the location in the binder you want them.

Search Collections
There’s another way of creating collections, too—you can save your search results as
collections. Let’s create a collection of all documents with their status marked “To Do”:
1. Click on the downward-pointing arrow next to the magnifying glass in the search field
in the toolbar, and select “Status”.
2. Click in the search field and type “To Do”. The binder will be replaced by the regular
purple search results list (with its associated “Search Results” tab selected in the
Collections pane above). You could check with the Inspector and see that the status for
each is marked “To Do”, as you would expect, were the editor not locked.
3. Click on the downward-pointing arrow next to the magnifying glass in the search field
again, and this time select “Save Search…” from the bottom of the menu.
4. Enter a name for the search, e.g. “To Do” (it will use the search phrase by default) and
hit “OK”.
The search results will now change colour and you will see that a new tab has appeared in
the list of collections named “To Do”. Again, you can rename this or change the colour to one of
your choosing. The magnifying glass icon on the left of the tab indicates that this is a search
collection. These are different to regular, “arbitrary” collections in that you can’t arbitrarily add
documents to them or move them around within the list of other search results. Instead, every
time you click on a search collection, the search gets run again.
Search collections can be used in various ways. You could use one to keep track of the
storyline of a character in a novel, to highlight documents that contain a word you know you
overuse, and so on. The “Search Results” tab is itself really just a special type of search
collection—it will always show the results of the most recent search, even after you close and
reopen the project.

Modifying the Contents of a Search Collection

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 Since search collections are dynamically generated each time you load the tab, the
contents cannot be shuffled around or removed from the list. If you wish to have more
control over the list, you can either convert the search collection to an arbitrary
collection, with View > Collections > Convert to Standard Collection, or you can
select all of the contents of the search collection, and click the “+” button to create a
new arbitrary collection off of your selection.

To delete a collection of any kind, just select its tab and then click on the “-” button in the
“Collections” bar. Deleting a collection has no effect on its constituent documents—they are not
deleted and remain in their place in the binder.
There’s lots you can do with collections—or you don’t have to use them at all. Like most
things in Scrivener, they are available if you need them but can be ignored if you don’t.
Let’s unlock the editor now. Click on the icon in the header view again and this time de-
select “Lock in Place”. Click on the “Binder” tab to return to the standard project Binder view.
At this point you can also click on the “Collections” icon in the toolbar to hide the collections
pane if you want.
Now it’s on to “Part 3”. Expand the “Part 3” folder if it is collapsed, and then click straight
on “Step 14: Importing”.

23
 CHAPTER QUATRO
Part 3: Import, Export and Printing

If you decide Scrivener is the program for you, the first thing you are going to want to do is
import your existing work. This is simple. Just go to File > Import > Files…, select the files
you wish to import, and click the “Import” button. If you wish to import including
subdirectories, maintaining the filing structure from Explorer in the binder, then drag & drop the
folder into the Binder, instead. You can also drag files from Scrivener’s binder out again to
export.

Files Won’t Import?

Note that if you have selected a document that is contained inside the “Draft”
folder in the binder, when you go to File > Import > Files… you will only have the
option of importing text file types; this is because files are imported at the location of
the selection in the binder and the “Draft” folder only supports text files. Thus, if you
wish to import media files, make sure that the selection is not in the “Draft” folder.

The following file types are supported by Scrivener’s import feature:

▪ RTF
▪ DOC
▪ DOCX
▪ TXT / plain text
▪ PDF
▪ Final Draft FDX
▪ HTML
▪ HTM
▪ Most image files
▪ Windows media files (.wmv, .wav, .mp3 and .wma)

(Note that you can also copy and paste content into Scrivener from any source. If rich text
formatting is not critical it is recommended that you copy and paste using Edit > Paste and
Match Style (or Ctrl-Shift-V). This method will ensure that text pasted from other applications
is cleaned and usable within Scrivener, in much the same way that pasting text into Notepad and
then back out again would “clean” it of all formatting.)
It is important to note that some attributes may be lost for certain document types upon
24
 It is important to note that some attributes may be lost for certain document types upon
import.
You can also import web pages directly from the Internet by using File > Import > Web
Page….
You can actually import any file at all—it doesn’t have to be one of the supported formats
listed above. If you import an unsupported file type, it will appear in the editor as a link.
Double-clicking on the link will open the file in the program associated with it on your machine.

On to Step 15...

What if you want to use Scrivener but are worried about being locked in? The Scrivener
project folder format (the project is the entire contents of the folder ending in “.scriv”) is unique,
so what happens if you want to move your work elsewhere? Fear not: you are not locked in at
all. Simply select all of the files you want to export in the binder (everything if you so wish) and
then go to File > Export > Files… Enter the name of the directory that will be created to hold
all of the files, choose your preferred text file format and whether you want to include notes and
meta-data in the export (which will include the synopses), then hit “Export”. All the selected
files will be exported with the binder structure intact; that is, the virtual folders in the binder will
become actual folders in the Windows Explorer. You can even drag the selected documents from
the binder onto your desktop or Windows Explorer. All files in the Draft folder will be exported
as RTF and all the other files will simply be copied in their native format.
That’s how you can get anything out of Scrivener. Generally, however, the files you have
inside a Scrivener project are there to support your writing—the text you have been slaving over
—writing, editing, cutting up, rearranging—in the Draft folder. The whole point of Scrivener is
to produce that text, so at some point you are going to want to export or print it as a single
document or manuscript.

To find out how, go to Step 16.

Scrivener’s purpose is to provide a sort of writer’s studio; a place where you throw
everything, all of your research, ideas and scribblings, with the aim of mashing it together into a
draft which you can then either print for posting off to a publisher, or export, whether to another
program for tweaking or to an e-book format for self-publishing. This is where Scrivener’s
Compile feature comes in.
The Compile feature takes everything that is in the Draft folder and generates a single,
formatted document from it. You have complete control over the output—you can choose from
various file formats (or print directly from Scrivener), you can choose whether to include
document titles (or synopses and notes for that matter), set up a header and footer, and even
completely change the font and paragraph formatting if you so desire—so there’s no need to
write in the same font you use for printing and exporting unless you want to.
“Compile…” can be found at the bottom of the File menu. Try selecting it now, but then
click “Cancel” and come back here.
At first glance, it probably doesn’t look like much. This is because it is set up by default to
show only the most basic options—you can choose a preset from the “Format As” pop-up button
and a file format from the “Compile For” button, then click on “Compile” to create a basic
document containing the merged contents of your Draft folder.

25
 Saving Your Settings Without Compiling
As you proceed through these instructions, you may find that you need to return to
the editor to scroll the window or refresh your memory. While the Compile window is
open, you cannot make changes to your project, so you will be locked out of the
window. To return without losing the settings you’ve changed so far, use the “Save &
Close” button at the bottom of the Compile window.

Let’s try that now—we’ll generate a PDF preview of the draft of this tutorial project:
1. Go to File > Compile…
2. Ensure that “Custom” is chosen next to “Format As” (Custom represents the settings
that have been saved into the project. In this case, the tutorial has been set up to
compile a document that looks as it does in the editor).
3. Ensure “PDF (.pdf)” is selected next to “Compile For”.
4. Click on “Compile”.
5. Enter a destination and file name for the PDF and click Save.
6. Open the PDF produced by Scrivener.
You can choose from one of the other “Format As” presets to format your draft differently.
For instance, try compiling again, just as you did above, but this time choose “Novel Standard
Manuscript” format (be sure you choose “PDF (.pdf)” from the “Compile For” list again, as
changing the “Format As” option can affect the selected file format). This time, you will find
that the draft has been compiled using a Courier 12-point font with double line-spacing, with
chapter titles inserted from the folder names, and each text file separated with a hash-mark (”#”).

Format Setting Tips

Most of the presets in the “Format As” menu will apply different formatting to
your manuscript—different fonts, different page settings, titles, separators and so on.
If you find yourself getting frustrated when trying to tweak the Compile settings, or if
you want to start from scratch, it is often a good idea to select “Original” and start
from there. “Original” is set up so as not to override any of the formatting—the
exported or printed manuscript will look just like the text in the main editor. You can
then work through the Compile options, setting them up as required.

That’s all you need to know for creating basic print-outs and exported files from your draft.
At some point, though, you may find that you want more control over the document being
produced. Try going back to the Compile dialogue and clicking on the expansion arrow:

26
 The Compile dialogue will expand to show a whole raft of options. You don’t really need to
worry too much about all of these settings at the moment—the main thing to know is just that
this is where you come to export or print your entire manuscript, and that the Compile settings
provide complete control over how your manuscript will be formatted should you need it.
Let’s try a quick custom compile though. This time, with the compile dialogue expanded to
show all of the advanced options, try the following:
1. Choose “Original” from the “Format As” list again, to reset the compiler to use basic
settings.
2. Take a look at the “Contents” pane. This allows you to choose which documents get
compiled. The pop-up button at the top, which currently says “Draft”, can be used to
choose only a subfolder of the Draft (so that you could compile and print only a single
chapter, for instance) or to choose one of the collections we created in Part 2 (so you
can compile only the documents that appear in a particular collection). You can uncheck
the “Include” button for any document you don’t want included in your compiled
document, and there are some filter options at the bottom of this pane, too. You can thus
fine-tune which documents go into your final manuscript. All we’re going to do is click
on the pop-up button at the top that currently says “Draft”, and choose “Part 1:
Basics”—that is, we are only going to compile the “Part 1” folder.

3. Click on “Formatting”. This is the part of the Compile sheet that allows you to choose
how your text looks—what font it uses and suchlike. At the top is a list with a folder,
text group and text document in it, each saying “Level 1+” next to them (text groups are
just text documents that have other text documents grouped inside them—have a look at

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3.

just text documents that have other text documents grouped inside them—have a look at

“Step 5: The Inspector” to see an example of one). Each document type can be
formatted separately.
4. At the top of this pane you will see a button entitled “Override text and notes
formatting”. It is unchecked at the moment, which means that the text (and notes should
you choose to include them) of each document will appear in your compiled manuscript
exactly as they do in the editor, just as they did the first time you compiled. We’re going
to override the formatting, though, so click on this button to tick it.

5. Click on the top item in the “Type” list, the “Level+” row with the folder icon in it.
Note that each row has tick boxes for “Title”, “Meta-Data”, “Synopsis”, “Notes” and
“Text”. These tick boxes determine which parts of the document will get included in
your text. So at the moment, only the text of folder documents, text groups and text
documents will be included, because only the “Text” button is ticked for each. Let’s
change this. Click on the “Text” button in the folder row to remove “Text” and then tick
the “Title” button instead. Note how the text in the bottom pane has changed to show
the word “Title” all by itself. This bottom text area gives you a preview of what the
document will look like, so in this case it shows us what folder documents will look like
when exported or printed—they will show only their titles. Let’s doctor that up a bit.
6. Click the “Modify” button and then into the bold “Title” text in the dialogue window
that appear. Note how the ruler and formatting bar become active when you do so. Click
on the centred text button, and click on the “A” button to choose a different font. Make
the font big.

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 7. Above the formatting bar, click on the “Page padding” stepper control to change the
page padding to “8 lines”. This will add eight lines of blank space before the documents
of the folder type whenever they start on a new page. (You’ll see what I mean in a
minute.) Click “OK” to save these changes.
8. Next, click on the text group row (the middle one), and tick the “Title” checkbox. Leave
the “Text” checkbox ticked for this one, though. The text area at the bottom will be
updated to reflect your changes.
9. Click the “Modify” button and then click the title text to select it. Change it to
underlined and italicised, using the format bar, and change its colour to blue using the
colour control.
10. Click into the main text area and change the formatting to whatever you want—use the
“A” button to change the font, the ruler to change the paragraph indenting, and the line
spacing control in the format bar to change (who’d have thought it) the line spacing.
11. Click on the last row, the text icon with “Level 1+” next to it, and do the same again,
but this time choose a different format for the title and text.
12. Now, from the list of settings on the left, choose “Separators”. This section allows us to
choose how our documents should get stitched together—whether we should put page
breaks between the different components or just line breaks and so forth.
13. For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”.

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 14. For the “Folder and Text separator”, choose “Single return”. This will ensure that the
text of any documents following a folder will be added straight after the folder titles
which we set up in our formatting options.
15. The last option we need to change is in the “Transformations” pane. Disable “Remove
text color”, as this will strip out all text colouring and render everything in black.
Ordinarily this is useful since text colour is often used to indicate edits or highlight
mistakes. In this example, we want to use colours for our titles.
16. Right, at last, click on the “Compile For” drop down and select “Preview”. Then click
“Compile” to open a preview.
Take a look through the preview document to see what you’ve done—you’ve added titles
and completely changed the way the text looks. Once you’re happy with that, click the preview
click the “Close” button to return to the Compile dialogue. We’re just going to make one tweak,
as follows:

1. Choose the “Formatting” pane again.

2. Select the third row, the “Level 1+” with the single text icon next it.
3. Click on the “Add formatting level” button:

A “Level 2+” row will appear, slightly indented below the “Level 1” text row. The
“Level 1” row will no longer have the plus sign after it, either. I’ll explain what this
means in a moment. If you click between the “Level 1” and “Level 2+” rows, you will
see that the formatting in the text area at the bottom is the same for each—that’s
because the new formatting level is created using the same formatting as the selected
row by default.
4. Click on the “Add formatting level” button again so that a “Level 3+” row is created.
5. Make sure the “Level 3+” row is selected and then click the “Modify” button and into
the text area and change formatting to something glaring. Change the text colour to
bright green or suchlike.
6. Click on the “Compile” button again and once more view the results in Preview, this
time looking out for the green or lurid text formatting you added.
What just happened?
What you should have seen is that all documents contained inside the “Step 5: The
Inspector” group came out using your lurid formatting, but everything else stayed the same as
the previous compile. Why? Because you can set up the formatting on a per-document-level
basis if you like, and that’s what we just did. If you look at the binder, the folders “Part 1:
Basics” and so on are all contained in the Draft folder at the first level—that is, they are one
level deep in the Draft folder. If you then look at “Step 1”, “Step 2” and so on, these are two
levels deep in the Draft folder, because they are contained inside the “Part 1” folder which itself
is contained in the Draft folder. “5a: The Synopsis Index Card” and the other documents grouped
inside the “Step 5: The Inspector” document are on the third level. And so it was only these
documents that were affected by our “Level 3+” formatting settings. Incidentally, the “+”
indicates that this is the last level we have set up formatting options for, and so it will be applied
to any levels of document in the Draft that go deeper (so if we’ve only set up two formatting
levels, documents three or four deep in the binder will receive the same formatting as those at
two levels deep).
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Now on to the fourth part…

31
 CHAPTER CINCO
Part 4: Text Tools

Okay, so you imported all your work into Scrivener. But you had a lot of long documents
and now you want to chop them up so that you can experiment with moving the various parts
around. No problem. The Documents menu features Split > At Selection and Split > with
Selection as Title. These features allow you to chop up existing documents very easily and
quickly. With “Split at Selection”, you simply click inside a text document so that the cursor is
at the point where you want to split the document. Selecting this menu option will split the
document into two at the cursor point. Try putting the cursor at the end of this paragraph and
doing that now.
You should see that your input focus has been moved to the Binder so you can name this
new chunk of text, and everything prior to the point above has been removed from this
document. Click on the prior document in the Binder, and you’ll see the previous bit of text from
before the split. Use the back button to return here when you are done.

Sample Title
“Split with Selection as Title” works in much the same way, except you select a range of text
before clicking on it. The selected text will become the title of the newly-created document. This
is useful, for instance, if you have a long document containing several chapters each with a title
you want to use as the document title. Try triple-clicking the “Sample Title” line above, and
using the Split > with Selection as Title menu command.
You can also merge documents. Selecting several documents in the binder and then choosing
Documents > Merge will merge the selected documents into one. Select the top “Step 17…”
item in the Binder, and then Shift-click on the “Sample Title” document. Use Documents >
Merge to join them back together. A single empty line will be inserted in between each of the
merged documents to make it easier to see where the joins were.

Next we’ll look at some of the text options available in Scrivener.

THE FORMAT BAR

The format bar runs horizontally just below the toolbar and allows you to access common
formatting commands easily. From the format bar you can change the font, text alignment, line
spacing, text and highlight colour, and create lists. You can turn the format bar on or off by
choosing “Hide Format Bar” from the Format menu. Note that if you click the downward arrow
beside the text colour or highlight buttons in the format bar, a menu will appear that allows you
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beside the text colour or highlight buttons in the format bar, a menu will appear that allows you
to choose from a list of colours (clicking on the buttons applies the currently-selected colour).
You can customise what appears in the format bar with the Tools > Customize Toolbars…
menu command.

THE FORMAT MENU

The Format menu provides various ways of formatting your text which are standard in many
applications along with some that are unique to Scrivener, the latter of which are listed below.

HIGHLIGHT
Pretty straightforward, this one. Choose from several standard highlighter pen colours to
highlight your text.

INLINE ANNOTATION AND FOOTNOTES

Inline annotations and footnotes allow you to make notes right inside your text.They look
like this:
This text has a footnote after it.2 When the text is compiled, exported or printed, this footnote
will be turned into a “real” footnote (or endnote).
Each was created by selecting the text and choosing either “Inline Annotation” or “Inline
Footnote” from the Format menu. Alternatively, you can also just choose “Inline Annotation” or
“Inline Footnote” with no selection and start typing (note that you can change the colour used
for annotations in the Appearance tab of Tools > Options...). When you export your work,
ranges of text defined as footnotes can be turned into real RTF footnotes that can be read by
Word, OpenOffice.org, WordPerfect and other major word processors. Ranges of text defined as
annotations can be turned into RTF comments (which Word can read) or omitted altogether. One
thing to note is that when you create inline footnotes, the grey bubble should start exactly where
you want the footnote marker to appear in the printed or exported text. Just think of the whole
bubble as being the number in the final text.

SCRIVENER LINKS
Scrivener links are much like web hyperlinks, except that they link to other documents
within the current Scrivener project. To create a Scrivener link, select the name of the document
to which you wish to make a link from the Scrivener Links menu in the Edit menu. This will
create a hyperlink in your text document. Clicking on a Scrivener link will open the linked
document in a split pane. Scrivener links can be useful for creating tables of contents or
references within your research.
Try clicking on the Scrivener link below:

spacewalk_info

A PDF document will be opened in a new pane. Close the split pane and then move on to
“Step 19” in Part 5.

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 CHAPTER SEIS
Part 5: Customising Projects

At this point, we’ve covered all of the major features of Scrivener. If you haven’t done so
already, then soon you are going to want to create your own project so that you can start work.
Generally you will want a separate Scrivener project for each writing project you are working
on. To create a new project, select “New Project…” from the File menu, which will open the
project template chooser panel. From there, you can choose a project type from one of the
categories (novel, screenplay, thesis and so on). Once you’ve done so, click on “Choose…” to
specify a location at which to save the project. Scrivener project folders end in “.scriv” which
might seem a little strange. This is to maximise the cross-platform compatibility of the project.
When viewed on a Mac, the folder will look and act like a single file. You will need to open
Scrivener projects by double-clicking on the main project folder and then double-clicking the
project document in that folder (if you have Explorer set up to show extensions, it is the one
with the “.scrivx” extension). That file is not your entire project; it is the master control file that
keeps track of all the pieces. If you wish to copy your project to another computer or back it up,
make sure to send the whole folder ending in .scriv. You can also open projects using the File >
Open… command, or if you’ve worked on the project recently, it might be listed in the File >
Recent Projects sub-menu.
Note that the “Blank” project type is the basis for all other project types. That is, all the other
project templates were created by starting from a blank project, adding some documents and
changing the settings relevant for the project type, and then saving the resulting project as a
template. If you find that none of the existing templates are quite right for the sort of writing you
do, you can create your own project templates in the same way, like this:
1. Create a new project—either from the Blank template or from any other template—and
edit it so that it contains all the elements and settings you will want in a new project
whenever it is created from your template. This can be as simple as you like, maybe just a
few tweaks to Blank.
2. Select “Save As Template…” from the File menu.
3. From the “Save As Template” sheet that appears, enter a title and description for the new
template, and choose a category and icon, then click on “OK”.
4. Go to File > New Project… You will find the template you just created available as the
basis for new projects. At this point you can delete the project from which you created the
template, if you wish. Since projects are just folders of files, deleting the folder ending in
“.scriv”, using Explorer, is how you do this.

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 Okay, on to Step 20, the “And Finally…” bit.

This has been a fairly thorough tour of all of the main features of Scrivener. You probably
won’t use half of the features you’ve just learnt of for some time—in fact, on a daily basis, you
will probably only use the most basic features of writing in the editor, creating new documents,
and moving documents around in the binder. Everything in Scrivener gets out of your way until
you need it—but at least you know what’s available and have a good idea of what you can do.
There’s plenty of other stuff in there, too. For instance, I neglected to mention the project
targets and statistics features in the Project menu, which you may well use frequently if you
need to write a particular length. They are fairly self-explanatory, though, so just try them out.
What else? Well, once again, remember that Scrivener expects you to put everything that
you want to export as part of your manuscript (okay, typescript for the pedants) inside the Draft
folder. And remember that Scrivener is really about “hammering out” that draft; it is not a word
processor or full page layout program, so at some point—unless you just want a very basic
manuscript—you may well want to move your work into a word processor or dedicated
scriptwriting program for final formatting.
Experiment! You should be able to work out the rest by playing with the program. If you get
stuck, be sure to check out the comprehensive Scrivener Manual from the Help menu. Note that
it is a PDF, so while you are learning the program you might consider importing it into your
working project binder’s research section for easy access. If you still have a problem, check out
the knowledge base, or take a look at some of our tutorial videos on the web page:

http://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/videos.php

And of course, if you are still baffled, post a question on the user forums!

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum

Likewise, if you encounter any bugs or glitches, no matter how small—and especially if you
experience a crash—please post to the forums or e-mail us at
windows.support@literatureandlatte.com.
We hope you enjoy using Scrivener and find it a useful tool, and offer our heartfelt thanks to
you for choosing Scrivener (or considering it) as the tool for your own writing.

NEXT STEPS
You are now ready to begin your own project—go to File > New Project to get going.
Happy writing!

1 This is a footnote. In order for footnotes to get exported properly, it’s important to add them
in such a way that the link ends exactly where you want the footnote to appear in the exported or
printed text.
2 This is a footnote.

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