Scrivener’s main interface comprises the following:

• The list on the left is called the binder, because it acts as the
project’s ring-binder, being where you file and organise all of your
material.

• The editor contains the text you are reading right now, and is
where you’ll do all your writing. It can also show research
documents, such as images and PDF files.

• If you click on the “i” in the right of the toolbar (the strip of
buttons at the top of the window), you’ll open the inspector. The
inspector displays information relating to the document currently
shown in the editor, such as its synopsis, label and status.

Let’s start by looking at the binder in a little more detail—in the binder
sidebar, click on the document entitled “The Binder”.

Using the Binder

The binder is the main navigation tool in Scrive

1
ner. You use it to access different parts of your project, as well as to
create new sections and arrange them. (Note: we refer to each section in
the binder as a “document”, but each document can contain as much or
as little text as you like.)

The basics are simple:

• Click on a document to open it in the editor.

• Click on the triangle next to a folder or group to show or hide

(expand or collapse) its contents (subdocuments).

• Drag and drop documents to rearrange them.

• Double-click on a document to rename it.

• Click “+” in the footer at the bottom of the binder (or in the

2
 toolbar) to create a new document. (Cmd-N)

• To create a new folder, click the button containing a folder with a

“+” inside it at the bottom of the binder, or click the down arrow
next to the “+” button in the toolbar. (Opt-Cmd-N)

• You can also add new documents from the Project menu or by
hitting enter when a document is selected and the binder has the
focus.

• Import files into Scrivener by dragging them from the Finder into
Scrivener’s binder. Alternatively, use File > Import > Files… in
Scrivener’s main menu at the top of the screen.

Special Folders
Along with anything else you add, the binder always contains three
special folders that cannot be removed:

1. The Draft folder. Anything you want to be part of your finished

manuscript should be placed inside this folder. Its contents will be
compiled into a single document when you export or print using
File > Compile… Because the Draft folder is used for building your
manuscript, it is unique in that it can only hold text files—you
cannot import image or research files into this folder.

⁃ Tip: If you want an image in the text of your manuscript,

place the cursor inside a text document in the Draft and use
Insert > Image From File… to insert the image into the text.

⁃ Note: All folders and files can be renamed, even the special
folders. In some of Scrivener’s project templates, the Draft
folder has a different name, such as “Manuscript”.

3
 2. The Research folder can hold text or media files (images, PDF files,
video files and more), and is the default storage location for
research materials not intended for inclusion in the final
manuscript. You don’t have to put all your research files into the
Research folder, though—you can create other folders for your
support materials anywhere you want.

3. Whenever you delete a document, it ends up in the Trash folder.

Documents are not deleted forever until you select Empty Trash… from
the Project menu.

There’s Nothing Special About Other Folders

In Scrivener, there’s no real difference between folders (excepting the
three special folders) and text files. A folder is just a special kind of text
file that has a different icon and opens in a different editor view mode by
default (we’ll get to view modes shortly).

You can convert a folder document to a text document and vice versa
easily. Try this now:

• Ctrl-click (or right-click) on “Get Oriented” in the binder (directly

beneath the yellow “The Basics” folder).

• From the contextual menu that appears, select Convert to File. Note
how the folder icon becomes a text stack icon.

• Ctrl-click (or right-click) on “Get Oriented” again. You’ll see that

the option is now Convert to Folder—click it to convert back. (You
can also convert from the Documents menu.)

So, whether you prefer to use folders or text groups is entirely up to you,
and you can convert between them at any time. (Note: A text or file

4
group is any non-folder that has subdocuments.)

Searching
To search for documents in the project:

1. Click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar. A search field will

appear at the top of the binder.

2. Enter text in the search field. The binder will be replaced with a
purple search results list.

⁃ Tip: Click on the magnifying glass icon in the left of the

search field to change search options.

3. Click on the “X” in the left of the search results header bar to
return to the binder, or click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar
again.

4. Click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar to hide the search field
if it is still visible.

You can also run a quick search for documents using Quick Search field
in the toolbar (which currently shows “The Binder”, the current
document name). This works like the search field in Safari and brings up
a menu of the top results. This is great when you know the title of the

5
document you want to find.

Now let’s take a look at the editor—click on “The Editor” in the binder.

The text you are reading now is contained in the editor. There are several
ways to load a document into the editor, but the one you will use most
often is to select a file in the binder, as you did to load this one.

Scrivener’s editor can display a range of different file types, so let’s try
loading an image:

• In the binder, scroll down to the “Research” folder (you might

need to expand it by clicking on the triangle next to it first) and
then click on “Sunset”.

• Once you’ve tested that out, return here.

Using the Editor

• The Format Bar appears directly below the toolbar. It provides easy
access to many common formatting controls, such as bold, italics,
paragraph alignment and spacing, and highlights.

• More formatting features can be found in the Format menu.

• The Insert menu allows you to insert images, tables, footnotes,

comments and other elements into the text.

• Edit > Find > Find… in the main menu or using the keyboard
shortcut Cmd-F brings up the Find panel, allowing you to search
through text in the editor.

• If you’re a screenwriter, playwright or comic writer, you can enter

6
 scriptwriting mode via Format > Scriptwriting. (You can also toggle
between scriptwriting and regular modes using the keyboard
shortcut Cmd-8.)

The Header View

The header view (or bar) runs across the top of the editor and contains
the name of the document, along with providing some useful tools.

Because in Scrivener you can break your writing up into sections as

large or small as you want, you’ll spend a lot of time jumping between
them in the binder. Frequently, you’ll simply want to return to the last
document you were looking at. You can do so using the history navigation
buttons:

• Try clicking on the back button (the left-pointing chevron) on the

left of the header bar. It will take you to the previous document
you were looking at.

• Click on the forward button next to it to return here.

• The up and down chevrons on the right of the header view work
similarly, except that instead of navigating through the document
history, they take you to the next or previous document in the
binder.

7
 Note: After navigating with the history buttons, the binder selection
may not match what is shown in the main editor. (You can thus check
back on a document you edited earlier without losing your place.)
When the editor shows a different document to the one selected in the
binder, a secondary light grey bar appears in the binder to indicate the
current editor document.

Tip: Using Navigate > Reveal in Binder tells the binder to select the
document currently open in the editor.

Also in the header bar:

• You can Control-click (or right-click) into the header view to bring
up a menu of useful options.

• You can click into the title to rename the document.

• You can drag the icon shown next to the title in the same way that
you can drag documents in the binder.

• You can drag a document from the binder into the header bar to
load it.

• The square icon on the very right of the header view will split the
editor, but we’ll come to that shortly.

The Footer View

The footer view is the horizontal bar beneath the editor. It will contain
slightly different controls depending on what is open in the editor.

• When text is open in the editor, its word count is shown in the
footer view. (You can change this to show the character count
using Scrivener’s “Editing” preferences, available from Scrivener >

8
 Preferences… in the main menu.) Click on the word count for more
information.

⁃ Tip #1: If the word count ever disappears from the footer
view, it is most likely because you have switched on
scriptwriting mode (see above).

⁃ Tip #2: To see the word count of your entire draft, hover over
the search field in the toolbar with your mouse. Doing so
will display a count of all the words in the Draft folder (on
the left) and a count of the words you have written in the
current session (on the right).

⁃ Tip #3: You can set a word or character count target for you
manuscript via Project > Show Project Targets. (You can also
set targets for individual documents by clicking on the target
icon in the footer view.)

• You can change the current text scale (zoom) using the percentage
control on the left of the footer view. (This does not change the font
size; it just zooms in and out of the document.)

• When viewing 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.

At this point, now that you know how to use the binder and editor, you
could go off and start using Scrivener, because the binder and editor are
the two features you’ll be using the most. So if you’re itching to jump in,
feel free to go and create your own project (File > New Project…) and
experiment. Just know that, like Luke Skywalker at the end of The
Empire Strikes Back, you’re not fully trained in the ways of the Force just
yet. Be sure to come back to Dagobah here as soon as you’re ready to

9
continue your training.

Ready? Okay, click on “The Inspector” in the binder (or the down
chevron on the right of the header view) and let’s do ourselves some
inspecting.

Click the blue “i” icon on the right of the toolbar to open the inspector.
The inspector will appear as a third pane on the right of the window,
and it shows extra information associated with the document that you
have open in the editor.

At the top of the inspector you will see these buttons:

These buttons change what is displayed in the inspector. From left to

right, they are:

• Notes: The document synopsis and notes.jjkkjkjkj

• Bookmarks: Bookmarks associated with the document and project.

• Metadata: Various metadata relating to the document.

• Snapshots: Snapshots you have taken of the document. (Snapshots

are older versions of the document.)

• Comments & Footnotes: Comments and footnotes associated with

the text in the editor.

The buttons available will change depending on what sort of document

is shown in the editor. For instance, “Snapshots” and “Comments &

10
Footnotes” are only available for text documents.

A dot in the corner of one of these buttons indicates that there is content
in the associated pane.

Let’s start by clicking on the Notes button. Once you’ve done that, select
“Synopsis & Notes” in the binder.

Synopsis Index Card

At the top of the Notes pane of the inspector is a virtual index card, in
which you can type a synopsis of your document (the header of the
index card can be used to rename the document, too).

A core idea behind Scrivener is that every section of the project is

associated with a synopsis which can be viewed either alongside the
section text (in the inspector) or alongside other synopses (in the
corkboard or outliner). This allows you to switch between an overview
of your manuscript and its text.

Imagine it like this: each document in Scrivener is a sheet of paper with

an index card clipped to it. You can scrawl a summary of the document
onto the index card, and then you can take the card and lay it out
alongside other index cards to work with the bigger picture. (We’ll see
that bigger picture when we come to look at the corkboard and outliner
views.)

Notes
Below the index card is the notes area, where you can jot down anything
relating to the document that you don’t want in the text itself, such as

11
ideas and problems.

On to “Label & Status”…

At the bottom of the inspector are the label and status pop-up buttons.
(This document’s label is “Blue” and its status is “To Do”.)

Label and status are simply arbitrary tags that you can assign to a
document. You set up the label and status tags you want to use in a
project by going to Project > Project Settings… You might, for example,
rename “Label” to “POV” (for Point of View) and use it to record the
name of the point-of-view characters in a novel, so that you can assign a
character to each scene.

Status works much the same way, 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 anything you
want. The only real difference between label and status is that labels
have colours associated with them, and status items do not.

Tip: To assign a label or status to multiple documents, select several

documents in the binder, Ctrl- or right-click on them, and select the
label or status from the contextual menu that appears.

Next, click on “Bookmarks” in the binder.

Click on the Bookmarks button in the inspector header bar (the second
icon).

The Bookmarks pane allows you to store references to other documents

in the project, on your hard-disk, or on the internet.

12
To add a new bookmark, do one of the following:

• Click the gear button above the Bookmarks list.

• Drag a document from the binder into the list.

• Drag a file from the Finder into the list.

• Drag a URL from a browser into the list.

Selecting a bookmark in the list opens the content of the bookmark in

the lower half of the inspector. You can see that the “Key Concepts”
document has been added as a bookmark for this document, and that its
text can be viewed right there in the inspector. (Click on “Key Concepts”
in the Bookmarks list at the top of the inspector if its contents are not
visible.)

Double-click a bookmark to open it: external bookmarks open in their

default application; internal bookmarks open inside Scrivener.

Bookmarks can be associated with either individual documents or the

entire project: click the bar labelled “Document Bookmarks” to switch
between Document Bookmarks (specific to the current document) and
Project Bookmarks (available from any document).

Project Bookmarks
Project Bookmarks can also be accessed from the bookmarks icon in the
toolbar, providing fast navigation to frequently-needed documents:

• Click the red bookmark icon in the toolbar. A list will appear. I
have already added the “START HERE” document to the project
bookmarks.

13
 • Click “START HERE” in the list. The bookmarked document will
be opened in the editor.

• Hit the back button in the header view to return here afterwards.

Now select “Metadata” in the binder.

Scrivener’s Snapshots feature keeps older versions of your documents

around for reference. To capture a version before embarking on a major
edit of a document, select Take Snapshot (Cmd-5) in the Documents >
Snapshots menu. Try that now (you will hear the sound of a camera
shutter which indicates that the snapshot has been taken).

Once you have taken a snapshot, you can edit your document safe in the
knowledge that you can return to the older version whenever you want.

Click on the “Snapshots” button (the one with the picture of a camera on
it) in the inspector header bar to see what I mean.

• 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 way back in 2006.

• Clicking on a snapshot in the list reveals its text in the lower part
of the inspector.

• Restore an older version of your text by selecting the version you

want from the list and clicking on Roll Back at the top (at which
point, you will be given the option of taking another snapshot of
your current version).

14
 Note: You can immediately tell which documents have snapshots
associated with them because their icons have dog-eared corners.

To see what’s changed in the document since the snapshot was taken,
click on “Compare”. Try that now:

Type some text on the line below (anything you want):

Delete the text in the following line:

Now:

• In the inspector, select the snapshot you took a moment ago.

• Click “Compare”. See what happens?

⁃ Text that has been added to the document since the snapshot
was taken appears underlined and in blue.

⁃ Text that has been deleted appears struck out and in red.

⁃ Note that the comparison only shows textual changes—it

does not show changes to the formatting.

• Click on the left and right arrows at the top of the inspector, next
to the gear button, to navigate between the changes.

15
 Tip: You can alter the granularity (level of detail) of the comparison by
clicking on the gear button next to “Compare” (which should now
read “Original”, because clicking on it again will turn off the compare
feature). Changing the granularity will give different results for
different documents, depending on the scope of the edits. You will
usually achieve the best results by leaving “By Paragraph” ticked but
playing with “By Clause” and “By Word”.

You can also compare the differences between two snapshots by

selecting them both in the list and clicking on Compare.

Let’s move on to “Comments & Footnotes”.

Now we’ll look at the “Comments & Footnotes” pane—don’t worry

about clicking on the button in the inspector header bar just yet, though.

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 directly below the comment in the
inspector.

This sentence has a footnote attached.1

See how clicking on the note in the inspector automatically selects the

1 This is a footnote. For footnotes to be 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
text.

16
text associated with it in the editor?

If you click on a note in the inspector, the editor automatically scrolls the
text to where the note is located. Try scrolling to the bottom of this
document, and then clicking the comment in the inspector to return to
the top.

Tip: If the comments aren’t open in the inspector and you don’t want to
show them, Opt-click or Cmd-click on a comment or footnote to open
it in a popover instead of in the inspector.

Adding Comments and Footnotes

Let’s try adding some comments and footnotes of our own. First, select
some of the text in the following sentence:

S˜#ome of the text in this sentence2.

Next, do one of the following:

• Click on the paperclip icon in the toolbar and select Add Comment
from the menu that appears.

• Click the comment icon in the “Comments & Footnotes” bar of the
inspector.

• Go to Insert > Comment in the main menu (or hit Shift-Cmd-8). A

new comment will be created in the inspector ready f or

2 Konstantin Piecha 06.03.18, 23:14

17
 e diting.

Then:

• Add some text.

• Hit the Escape key to return the focus to the editor.

You add footnotes in exactly the same way, but choosing Footnote in the
menu or clicking the “cf” icon in the inspector.3

Note: It doesn’t matter where you attach comments, but with footnotes
you should always ensure that the footnote link (the grey highlight)
ends at the place you want the footnote number to appear when
printed or exported.

Changing the Colour of Comments

To change the colour of a comment:

1. Ctrl- or right-click on a comment in the inspector.

2. Select a colour from the menu that appears.

3. You can also hit Shift-Cmd-C (or go to Format > Color in the main
menu) to open the colour palette and choose a custom colour.

(You cannot change the colour of footnotes, which are differentiated

3 Lautdine

18
from comments by all being grey4.)

The contextual (Ctrl-click) menu also allows you to convert comments to

footnotes and vice versa, and to revert comments and footnotes to use
default formatting (which can be set in the “Editing” pane of the
Preferences).

Tip: If you have a lot of comments, you can collapse individual

comments and footnotes by clicking on the disclosure triangle (the
downward-pointing arrow) in the top-left of each comment box.

Right, that’s the inspector covered! Now let’s take a look at composition
mode. By now, you know the drill: click on “Composition Mode” in the
binder.

Composition mode blocks everything else out so that it’s just you and
your words. To enter composition mode, try one of the following:

• Click on the square, grey icon next to the blue inspector icon in the
toolbar.

• Hit Opt-Cmd-F on the keyboard.

• Go to View > Enter Composition Mode.

You will now be looking at nothing but your text. (When first entering
composition mode, you’ll see a message about typewriter scrolling—if
you would like to learn more about that feature, see the “Typewriter
Scrolling” bookmark in the inspector.)

4You can choose a different colour for footnotes via the “Appearance” pane of
Scrivener’s Preferences.

19
Here’s what you need to know about composition mode:

• When you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, a control
bar appears. This allows you to change the text zoom, the position
and width of the virtual paper, and fade the background in and
out. It also has buttons to bring up the keywords panel and
inspector.

⁃ Tip: Holding down the Option key while the control bar is
visible changes the “Paper Width” slider to “Paper Height”.

• You can customise the look of composition mode in the

“Appearance” pane of the Preferences. By default, the regular text
colour is overridden to appear as white on a dark grey-blue
background, but you can change this to use black-on-white, green-
on-black or anything you want.

• You can set a background image for composition mode via Project
> Project Settings…

• Switch documents in composition mode by going to Navigate > Go

To in the main menu, or by using the “Go To” button in the control
bar. (Also, the keyboard shortcuts Opt-Cmd-Up and Opt-Cmd-Down
navigate to the previous and next document in the binder, and
Cmd-[ and Cmd-] navigate back and forth through the document
history.)

• Hit Opt-Cmd-F or Escape to leave composition mode (or use the

button on the right in the control bar).

Okay, let’s leave composition mode now (hit Escape).

Your orientation is now complete! Let’s move on to the organisation

tools. To access the next section, we’re going to do something a little

20
different—be sure to read all of the instructions below before following
them:

1. Click on the “Get Organised” folder. Upon so doing, this editor

will be replaced by the corkboard—a number of index cards
against a light brown background.

2. Once the corkboard appears, in the toolbar, click on the corkboard

icon (the centre icon in the group of three next to the search field)
to turn it off. Once you’ve done that, the corkboard in the editor
should be replaced with text, and the control in the toolbar should
look like this, with no section selected:

Off you go!

21
 difference between text and folder documents. The differences are as
follows:

1. They have different icons: folder icons are blue, and text document
icons are white rectangles.

⁃ Note that the folder icon for this document (“Get

Organised”) has a little text icon in its corner. This signifies
that this folder contains text—this text. (The text icon has
nothing to do with the folder having text documents inside it,
such as “Splitting the Editor” and so on—it means that this
folder document itself contains text.)

2. Folder documents always have “disclosure triangles” next to them

in the binder even when they have no subdocuments.

3. By default, folders and text documents open in different view

modes in the editor. As you saw, this folder opened in corkboard
mode before you turned the corkboard off.

We’ll come to this third point shortly—first, though, let’s look at how
you can view more than one document at the same time.

Select “Splitting the Editor” in the binder (you may need to expand “Get
Organised” by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to it). Or go get a
cup of tea and a biscuit and come back here when you’re ready—I’ll
wait!

When working on a long piece of writing, you may want to refer to

research or other parts of the manuscript. In Scrivener, you can split the
main editor into two and have different documents (or the same
document) open in each.

22
Let’s try that now by going to View > Editor Layout > Split Horizontally.

Alternatively, click on the button in the right of the editor header view
(the square with the horizontal line through its middle):

This document is now displayed in two panes.

Note:

• Through the View > Editor Layout menu, you can switch to a vertical
(side-by-side) split or remove the split to return to a single editor.

• Option-clicking on the split button in the header view toggles

between horizontal and vertical split mode. (Make sure the editor
is split horizontally for this tutorial - the button splits vertically by
default.)

• Clicking on the split button in the header view when there is a

split removes the split, returning to single editor mode.

Now let’s load a different document in one of the editors:

Select 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 focussed editor
turns blue.)

You can also drag a document from the binder to the header view of the
editor in which you wish to view it. Let’s do that now:

1. Make sure that this document, “Splitting the Editor”, is visible in

23
 the bottom pane.

2. Drag “Sunset” from inside the “Research” folder onto the header
view of the top pane.

You can use the split view to view any two documents in Scrivener
alongside one another, allowing you to refer to a text, PDF, image or
media document in one editor while typing in another.

Try loading different documents into the other editor now. Remember,
you can do this in two ways:

• Drag a document from the binder to the header view of the other
editor.

• Click into the editor you want to use so that its header turns blue,
and then select a document in the binder.

Tip: Double-clicking on the central divider will resize the two editors
so that they are of equal height or width.

Before moving on, let’s close the other editor. Do this by clicking on the
square button next to the up/down arrows in the right of the header
view above this editor. (Clicking this button when there is already a split
tells Scrivener to get rid of the split and remove the other editor.)

Next, click on “Editor View Modes”.

Scrivener’s editor has four possible modes—four different ways of

viewing your work. Learning how and when to switch between them
will make your Scrivener experience much more productive. You switch
between these modes using the View Mode control in the toolbar, which

24
looks like this:

Why are there only three icons if there are four view modes, I hear you
ask? Good question! Here’s why:

• When you are viewing a single document that has no

subdocuments (that is, a document that is not a group or folder
with other documents inside it), there are only three modes.

• An extra mode (called “scrivenings”) is available for groups.

• When you are viewing a group, the fourth mode is accessed by

turning off the other modes (just as you turned off the corkboard to
see the text associated with “Get Organised” not long ago).

That’s going to make a lot more sense if we go through the modes!

1. Single Document Mode

In single document mode, the editor shows the content of the current
document. So, if you’re looking at a text document (or folder), you’ll be
looking at its text; for an image document, single document mode shows
the actual image. The editor is in single document mode right now. In
this mode, the view mode control in the toolbar looks like this:

Note how the leftmost icon shows a single page, and that it’s selected.

2. Corkboard Mode
In corkboard mode, the editor shows the subdocuments of the current

25
document as index cards on a corkboard. Let’s take a look at how that
works right now:

• Select the “Get Organised” folder in the binder, and then click on
the corkboard icon (the middle button) in the view mode control to
select it:

Once you’ve taken a look at the corkboard, return here. See how
the subdocuments of the folder you selected appeared as index
cards?

(You might also note how the icon in the left button changes to
show two pages rather than one page when viewing a group—
we’ll get to that presently.)

• Next (after you’ve read this bit, so you know how to get back),
click the corkboard icon again, but this time while viewing the
document you are reading right now. You will see that the
corkboard is blank. This is because this document (“Editor View
Modes”) doesn’t contain any subdocuments—but it could: you
could drag documents into the blank corkboard or add some using
the “+” button.

• Click the text icon on the left of the view mode control to see the
text of this document again:

3. Outliner Mode
Like corkboard mode, outliner mode shows the subdocuments of the

26
current document, but it presents them as rows with various columns of
information. Try repeating everything you did for the corkboard mode
above, but this time, instead of selecting 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 though they were a single document. Scrivenings
mode is available in the following circumstances:

1. When a group is selected in the binder (a folder or any document

containing subdocuments).

2. When more than one document is selected in the binder. (You can
select multiple documents by holding down the Shift or Command
keys.)

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 scrivenings 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 next part so that you know what to do, once more
click on “Get Organised” in the binder. You will notice that the “View
Mode” icon in the toolbar changes. (If you have set the toolbar to show
text as well as icons, you will notice that it gets renamed, too, becoming
“Group Mode” instead of “View Mode”.)

27
The single text icon on the left has now changed into two pieces of
paper, representing a stack. This shows that it is possible to enter
Scrivenings mode.

Let’s try that now: after clicking on “Get Organised” in the binder:

1. Click on the scrivenings group mode icon (the two pieces of

paper).

2. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the editor, glancing at the
text it contains.

3. Return here either by clicking on “Editor View Modes” in the

binder or by hitting the back button.

Done that? You should have seen that the text from all the various
subdocuments of the “Get Organised” folder—including this one—were
presented as a single, continuous document, with dividers marking the
boundaries between them. You can edit text in Scrivenings mode just as
you can when text documents are viewed in isolation.

Note: When you selected the “Get Organised” folder again, it opened
in outliner mode because Scrivener remembers which mode you last
used to view a group. Whenever you change the group mode, the new
mode will automatically be used for groups until you change it again.

View Modes and Selections

You’ve now switched between all the main view modes. The main thing
to remember is that the view modes available depend on what has been

28
loaded into the editor from the binder:

• When one document with no subdocuments is loaded into the editor,

there are three view modes available:

⁃ Single document mode (view the document content, such as

its text).

⁃ Corkboard mode.

⁃ Outliner mode.

• When a folder or a document with subdocuments is loaded into the

editor, there are four view modes:

⁃ Scrivenings mode.

⁃ Corkboard mode.

⁃ Outliner mode.

⁃ Single document mode. In this case, you access single

document mode by turning off the other view modes—that is,
by clicking on the selected button in the view mode control
to deselect it.

• When multiple documents are selected in the binder (by Shift- or

Command-clicking on them), there are three view modes available:

⁃ Scrivenings mode. (In this case, single document mode is not

available because the editor is not displaying a single
document.)

⁃ Corkboard mode.

29
 ⁃ Outliner mode.

Tip: You can also switch between view modes using the top three items
in the View menu, or using the Cmd-1, Cmd-2 and Cmd-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, now that you know how to
switch between view modes, let’s take a closer look at them. Click on
“The Corkboard” when you’re ready.

The corkboard shows the immediate subdocuments of the selected

document. To see this in action:

1. Split the editor again by going to View > Editor Layout > Split
Horizontally (or using the button in the editor header view).

2. Click into the top editor so that its header view becomes blue (to
indicate that it has the focus).

3. Click on the “Draft” folder in the binder to load it in the top editor.

4. Make sure the corkboard is selected in the view mode control in

the toolbar.

Note how the corkboard in the top editor now shows the three folders,
“The Basics”, “Going Further” and “Tips”, represented as index cards. If
you look in the binder, you will notice that these three folders are the
immediate subdocuments of the Draft folder—that is, they are only
indented one level deeper than the Draft folder.

30
 Note: Index cards on the corkboard show the title and synopsis of each
document. If a document does not have a synopsis associated with it,
the first lines of its text will be displayed in grey instead.

Next, in the corkboard, double-click on the yellow book icon in the

second card. This will drill down to show the contents of the “Going
Further” folder on the corkboard.

You can edit the synopsis or title in a card by double-clicking into it, and
you can drag the cards around (and into the binder) to reorder your
documents. (If you try this out in the tutorial, be sure to put them back
into their original order afterwards!)

Now click on the “Research” folder in the binder. Note how media files
such as images are displayed as photographs on the corkboard rather
than as index cards (although you can change this behaviour via the
Preferences).

Tip: If the inspector is open, it will show information for the currently
selected document in the corkboard (or outliner). If nothing is selected,
information will be shown for the container document.

Corkboard Options
You can change settings such as the number of cards in a row and their
width by clicking on the button showing an icon of four index cards in
the right of the footer bar:

31
 • Other view options are available from the View > Corkboard Options
menu.

• Show status stamps on cards (diagonal stamps indicating the

status of each document) by going to View > Corkboard Options >
Show Status Stamps.

• Tint cards with label colours by going to View > Use Label Color In >
Index Cards.

• Ctrl-clicking on selected cards brings up a contextual menu,

allowing you to change the label and status of the documents
associated with those cards.

There’s a whole lot more you can do with the corkboard, so once you
feel at home in Scrivener, be sure to come back and check out the
corkboard section in “Going Further” (or have a look at the full user
manual available from the Help menu).

For now, though (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 the outliner. To do so, make sure the focus is in the bottom editor (by

32
clicking into it if necessary), and then select “The Outliner” in the binder.

The outliner allows you to see sections of the binder in more detail. It
works like the binder, showing an indented list of documents that can be
expanded and collapsed, but, unlike the binder, it can show synopses
and other information—as the name suggests, it’s a great way of
working with an outline of your manuscript. Let’s take a look at it:

1. Click into the upper editor pane (which should still show the
corkboard) so that it receives the focus (its header bar turning
blue), and then click on the “Draft” folder in the binder.

2. Select the “Outliner” segment of the view mode control in the

toolbar.

The upper editor now shows an outline of all items contained inside the
Draft folder (because that is what we selected in the binder). Click on a
disclosure triangle next to one of the folders to reveal more documents
(or Opt-click on a disclosure triangle to open all subfolders inside the
folder).

Using the Outliner

• The “Title and Synopsis” column shows (surprise, surprise) the
title and synopsis of each document.

⁃ Double-click into a title or synopsis to edit it.

• If a document has no title and no synopsis, the first lines of its text
will be displayed. If there is no text, “Untitled” placeholder text
will be shown.

33
 ⁃ Double-click into the placeholder to add a title.

⁃ Hit return to add a synopsis after you have typed the title.

⁃ If you only want a synopsis and no title, hit return as soon as

you double-click into the row, to leave the title area blank.

• If a document has a title but no synopsis, only the title will be

shown.

⁃ In this case, to add a synopsis, double-click the title to edit

and hit return at the end of the title to start typing a
synopsis.

• If a document has a synopsis but no title, only the synopsis will be

shown.

⁃ In this case, when you double-click into the synopsis to edit

it, a blank title line will appear above the synopsis so that
you can add a title if you wish. When you finish editing, if
you didn’t add a title, the title line will disappear again.

• You can drag, drop and remove documents just as you can in the
binder.

• You can move items around using the keyboard shortcuts found in
the Edit > Move menu.

Tip: The button on the right of the outliner footer bar (showing an icon
of three dots and lines) allows you to show and hide synopses.

Outliner Options
• Determine which columns are shown by clicking on the “>” button

34
 in the top-right of the outliner title bar, or via the View > Outliner
Options menu. The outliner can show as much or as little
information as you want.

• Outliner columns can be sorted by clicking on the column headers:

⁃ Click once to sort in ascending order.

⁃ Click again to sort in descending order.

⁃ Click a third time to remove the sort.

Right, on to scrivenings mode—make sure the focus is in the bottom

editor again (by clicking into it if necessary) and then select
“Scrivenings” in the binder.

The whole point of Scrivener is to make working on a long text easier by

allowing you to break it up into smaller pieces. Sometimes, however,
you will want to see how those smaller pieces fit into the greater whole.
This is where “Scrivenings” mode comes in.

There are two ways of entering Scrivenings mode:

1. Select a folder or group in the binder that contains text

subdocuments and use Scrivenings mode to view all of the
documents inside the folder as though they were a single text
document. (Note that the text of the folder itself is also included at

35
 the top.)

2. Select multiple documents in the binder and use Scrivenings mode

to view them as though they were a single document.

We already tried (1) when we were looking at “Editor View Modes”, so

let’s try viewing multiple documents this time:

1. Click into the outliner in the top editor so that the top editor gets
the focus (its header bar turning blue again).

2. Click on “START HERE” at the top of the binder.

3. With the Command key on the keyboard held down, click on

“Editor View Modes” and “Scrivenings”, so that all three
documents get selected.

4. Click on the Scrivenings mode icon in the view mode control in the
toolbar (the leftmost icon in the control, showing the two pieces of
paper). All three documents will now be loaded into the editor as a
single text.

5. Click the scrivenings contents button that appears in the right of

the header bar:

6. Select “Scrivenings” from the list that appears—the text will scroll
down to this document.

7. Type something in the following line:

Type fgfgfgfg here!

36
Take a look in the bottom editor—you’ll see the edits you made in
scrivenings mode are reflected there, too.

Note: In Scrivenings mode, the inspector displays information about

the section of text you are currently editing.

So that you can see where one document ends and the next begins, there
is a dashed, horizontal dividing line between sections, but if you prefer
you can also display the document titles above each section by selecting
View > Text Editing > Show Titles in Scrivenings from the menu.

Tip: You cannot make textual edits across document boundaries. You
can change formatting across boundaries though.

So, if you were writing a novel, you could write each scene of a chapter
in isolation and then view and edit the whole chapter by selecting the
chapter folder and entering Scrivenings mode.

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:

That’s it for “Get Organised”—if you’re still with me, then by now you
know almost everything you need to be productive with Scrivener. Next
we’ll look at how you get your work out of Scrivener. Ensure the “Get It
Out There” folder is expanded and then select “Section Types” in the
binder.

37
Scrivener is designed to be flexible, allowing you to organise your
writing however you want. You grow your manuscript in the Draft
folder in sections as small or large as you like, using whatever structure
you feel works best. When you are ready to get your manuscript out
there for other people to read, you “compile” the contents of the Draft
folder into a single exported or printed document.

Before we get to the Compile feature, however, we are presented with a

problem: given that you can arrange your manuscript however you
want, how can Scrivener know what each section is supposed to be, or
how it should be formatted or arranged in the final manuscript? How
can it know the difference between a title page and an introduction?

Or, suppose you decide to break up a novel by using a folder for each
chapter, with text documents inside those folders each representing a
scene. How does Scrivener know that your folders represent chapters
and your text documents represent scenes?

The answer is that you tell Scrivener what each piece is using Section
Types.

In the previous examples, you would:

1. Create section types in your project for “Title Page”,

“Introduction”, “Chapter” and “Scene”.

2. Ensure each document has the appropriate section type applied.

3. When compiling, tell Scrivener how to format each section type

(we’ll cover that in the next section).

Let’s see how section types work in practice:

1. Ensure the inspector is open and select the Metadata pane (the

38
 third button in the header bar, the one with the tag icon).

2. Under “General Metadata”, you will see a “Section type” pop-up

menu.

3. Clicking on it, you will find the following options:

⁃ Structure-based: Tells Scrivener that the current document

should use the default section type based on its indentation
in the binder (we’ll look at this in a moment).

⁃ Project-specific types: “Heading” and “Text” are the only two

section types specifically set up for this project—we’ll edit
them in a moment.

⁃ Edit: brings up the Project Settings panel so that we can edit

the section types.

Note that this document’s section type is displayed as “Text” in grey

italics. The grey italics indicate that this document is using the
“Structure-based” setting, and that the default section type for the
current document is “Text”. If we wanted, we could change it explicitly
to “Heading” or “Text” using the pop-up menu.

Defining Section Types

The above is all a little abstract. It will make much more sense if we
think about this in terms of the current binder and set up some custom
section types ourselves. Take a look at the contents of the Draft folder in
the binder:

• The three folders at the top level of the Draft folder are “The
Basics”, “Going Further” and “Tips”—the three folders that use
custom yellow icons (by “top level”, I mean the ones that are

39
 indented the least). The way I’ve organised this tutorial, each of
these folders represents a major part of the Draft.

• The blue folders inside the three top-level folders—folders such as

“Get Oriented”, “Get Organised” and so on—are essentially
chapters.

• The text documents inside the blue folders each represent a

different section inside a chapter.

So, the way I have organised the Draft for this tutorial is by parts,
chapters and sections. Let’s set up the section types of this project to
reflect that.

Tip: You can open these instructions in a separate window so that you
can read them while the Project Settings panel is open by clicking on
the yellow pencil button in the toolbar. This opens a “Quick Reference”
window which you can place alongside the main project window. If
there isn’t room on your screen for both windows, go to Window >
Float Quick Reference Panels. This will ensure the Quick Reference
window floats over the top of the main project window.

1. In the main menu, go to Project > Project Settings… and make sure
“Section Types” is selected in the list on the left of the window that
appears.

2. In the “Section Types” tab, double-click into “Heading” and

change its title to “Part”.

3. Do the same for “Text”, renaming it to “Chapter”.

4. Click the “+” button to add a third section type and name it
“Section”. (Note that you can drag and drop section types in this

40
 list to reorder them, but we’ll leave this order as-is.)

5. Click “OK”.

Now click on the section type pop-up menu in the inspector again.
You’ll see that where before there were options for “Heading” and
“Text”, there are now options for “Part”, “Chapter” and “Section”,
which makes much more sense for our project.

Defining Default Section Types by Structure

There’s a problem, however: this document is shown as being a
“Chapter” rather than a “Section”. One way we could fix this would be
to override the setting manually. Try that now:

1. Click on the section type pop-up menu in the inspector.

2. Change the setting to “Section”.

Great! Except… It’s going to be a pain to change that setting for every
single text document in the binder. Fortunately, we don’t have to. Let’s
change it back again:

1. Once more, click on the section type pop-up.

2. Change the setting to “Structure-Based”. (It will change back to

“Chapter” in italicised text.)

“Structure-Based” means: Use a default section type based on the indentation

of this document in the binder. But how does Scrivener pick a section type
based on indentation? That’s something you teach it in the Project
Settings again:

41
 1. Open the Project Settings from the main menu again.

2. This time, select the “Default Types by Structure” tab at the top. As
soon as you do, you’ll notice that many folders in the binder are
highlighted yellow.

3. Try clicking on the three rows—“All folders”, “All file groups” and
“All files”. As you do so, different documents will be highlighted
yellow in the binder.

The yellow highlights show which documents are affected by the

selected setting. So, when you select “All folders”, all folders are
highlighted yellow, for instance. Now let’s change the default settings:

1. Leave “All folders” as it is for now (so that the “Section Type” is
set to “Part”).

2. Change the section type for “All file groups” to “Section”. (A file
group is a text document containing other text documents.)

3. Change the section type for “All files” to “Section”.

4. Click “OK”.

We just told Scrivener that all folders are parts and all text documents
are sections. If you look over in the inspector again, you’ll see that the
section type for this document now correctly reads “Section”. If you
click on any other text document, you’ll also see the section type set as
“Section”. If you click on a folder, such as “The Basics” or “Get
Oriented”, you’ll see the section type set as “Part”.

But wait, we don’t want all folders to be parts—only the top-level

folders in the Draft (the ones using custom yellow icons) should be
parts. The folders inside them (one level deeper) should be chapters.

42
Let’s fix that:

1. Open Project Settings again.

2. Click on “All folders” to select it.

3. Click the “+” button (the one with two lines next to it).

4. Note how “All folders” changes to “Root folders” and another row
is added entitled “Level 1 folders and deeper”.

5. Click the “+” button again.

6. A “Level 2 folders and deeper” row will be added.

7. Try selecting the different folder settings—“Root folders”, “Level 1

folders” and “Level 2 folders and deeper”—and take notice of
what gets highlighted in the binder. You’ll see that the Draft folder
is a “root folder”, the yellow folders are at “level 1”, and the
folders using regular blue icons are at “level 2”.

8. Change the section type for “Level 2 folders and deeper” to

“Chapter”.

9. Click “OK”.

Now try clicking on “The Basics” and “Get Oriented” in the binder
again, taking note of the section type for each in the inspector, before
returning here. Scrivener now knows how our binder is structured, and
what each level represents. This means that, from now on, we’ll only
need to change the section type in the inspector for the occasional
document that we want to be different.

43
 Note: When you create a new project based on one of the templates,
such as the novel templates, the section types are all set up for you
(although you now know how to edit them should you so wish).

These section types are going to come in handy when we compile the
Draft, which is what we’ll move on to now…

We’ve seen that one of the key concepts of Scrivener is that you work on
your manuscript in pieces, but this wouldn’t be much use if you
couldn’t put Humpty together again. That’s where Compile comes in:
you write your manuscript in the Draft folder, and when you’re ready to
share it with the world, you “compile” it into a single file. Compiling
doesn’t affect the original documents inside Scrivener—they all stay as
they were in the Draft folder—it simply copies them into a combined
text in the form of an e-book, a PDF file, a Word file, a print-out, or
whatever format you choose.

Note: This section covers compiling your documents into a single file for
export or print. You can also export or print individual documents
separately using File > Print Current Document… or File > Export > Files…

Let’s try compiling the tutorial:

1. From the main menu, select File > Compile…

2. Make sure “Default” is selected under “Formats” on the left and

“Print” is selected next to “Compile for” at the top.

3. Click “Compile”.

4. In the print panel that appears, click on the “PDF” button in the
lower-left and select Open PDF in Preview.

44
A PDF document will open in Preview. Scroll through it, and you will
see that it contains everything you have read so far and more—
everything in the Draft folder compiled into a single text.

Using Compile Formats

In the PDF we just produced, the text looks exactly the same as it does in
Scrivener’s editor. What if you need to generate a manuscript using
standard formatting (e.g. Courier 12-point) to send to your editor,
though? Or what if you want to create a paperback for self-publishing?

With traditional word processors, you would need to go through and

reformat your entire manuscript for every format you wanted to create
—changing the font and paragraph settings and so on. In Scrivener,
there’s no need for any of that. You write using whatever font and
format you like looking at on the screen, and then you tell Compile to
change the formatting in the final document. You do this by choosing a
Compile Format from the list on the left of the Compile panel.

Let’s compile the tutorial into standard manuscript format, then:

1. Go to File > Compile… again.

2. This time, select “Manuscript (Courier)” in the “Formats” list.

3. Click “Compile” and again choose to open the PDF in Preview.

Huh. Other than a header at the top of the page, that doesn’t look any
different from before—why?

Remember how in the last section we looked at “section types”? We told

Scrivener what all the different parts of our Draft folder were (in the case
of this tutorial, parts, chapters and sections). Well, now we have to tell

45
Scrivener how to lay out each of those section types.

• Each Compile format consists of a number of “section layouts”.

• Each section layout defines a number of settings that can be

applied to a document in the Draft, such as whether the font face
and size should be changed, whether there should be a page break
before it, and so on.

• You apply a section layout to each section type in your project to

tell Scrivener how to format your manuscript.

Let’s tell Scrivener how to format the parts, chapters and sections in our
tutorial:

Tip: You can open these instructions in a separate window so that you
can read them while the Compile panel is open by clicking on the
yellow pencil button in the toolbar. This opens a “Quick Reference”
window which you can place alongside the main project window. If
there isn’t room on your screen for both windows, go to Window >
Float Quick Reference Panels. This will ensure the Quick Reference
window floats over the top of the main project window.

1. Open Compile again. (Note that “Manuscript (Courier)” will still

be selected.)

2. Click on “Assign Section Layouts” at the bottom of the central

“Section Layouts” area.

⁃ A window will appear. On the left is a list of the section

types defined in the project (“Part”, “Chapter” and
“Section”); on the right is a list of section layouts defined in
the current Compile format, along with a preview of how

46
 each section layout will make your text look.

3. Select “Part” in the list on the left.

4. Select the “Part Title” section layout on the right.

⁃ You have just told Scrivener that, when using the

“Manuscript (Courier)” Compile format, documents or
folders in this project that have the “Part” section type
applied should use the “Part Title” section layout during
Compile.

5. Select “Chapter” on the left.

6. Select the “Chapter Title” section layout on the right.

7. Select “Section” on the left.

8. Select “Section Text” on the right.

9. Click “OK”.

10. Click “Compile”, and again open the results in Preview.

You will now see that the font and formatting throughout the document
has been altered—it now uses Courier 12-point and parts and chapters
start on a new page with a title at the top.

Choose different Compile formats to apply different formatting—for

instance, the “Paperback (5.08” x 7.81”)” format will create a manuscript
suitable for submitting to CreateSpace.

47
Note: You can compile to many different file formats (e.g. Word, e-
book) by changing the “Compile for” setting at the top of the Compile
panel. Which Compile formats are available will depend on the file
format selected.

Compile Settings
• On the right of the Compile panel is a list of the documents that
will be compiled. Here you can un-tick any documents you don’t
want included and change the section types.

• Other options are available by clicking on the buttons in the

header bar above the contents list. The options available vary
according to the selected file format.

• At the bottom of the contents list are options for adding front and
back matter. Here you can select a folder contained outside of the
Draft folder, the contents of which will be added either to the front
or back of the manuscript. These settings are saved per-Compile
format, so that you can have different front and back matter for
different formats.

⁃ The lock button next to these options locks the front or back
matter folder to the current file format (as selected next to
“Compile for”). You won’t normally need to use this, unless
you want different front and back matter settings for
different file formats when using the same Compile format.
(For instance, you might want different front matter for the
ePub and Kindle versions of your e-book when using the “E-
book” Compile format.)

• You can override the font used throughout by using the “Font”

48
 pop-up menu at the top of the “Section Layouts” area.

Tip: If you hold down the Option key on your keyboard, the
“Compile” button in the Compile panel changes to “Save”, allowing
you to save the settings without compiling.

Creating Your Own Compile Formats

Scrivener comes with a number of Compile formats built-in. If they
don’t provide what you need, you can create your own, as follows:

1. Click on the “+” button below the Formats list.

2. If you want to create a new format from scratch, select “New

Format…”.

3. If you want to base your new format on an existing one, select

“Duplicate & Edit Format…”.

At this point, the entire window changes to present you with a wealth of
options. Here you can name the format, choose where to save it, create
your own section layouts, determine the size of the printed page, set up
page headers and footers, override styles, and much, much more. You
have complete control over how your work will look when compiled.

The gear button above the list on the left allows you to set the file
formats that will work with your Compile format. The “Test…” button
allows you to test your settings.

We won’t go into all the details of creating your own Compile format
here—the chances are that you will never need to create your own
format and will only use the formats built into Scrivener. For now, it’s
only important to know that you can create your own formats if you
ever need to. Refer to the user manual (available from the Help menu) if

49
you ever decide to get your fingers dirty (or just experiment—you can’t
break anything!).

Okay, we’re about done. Select “Creating a New Project” under “Get
Going” (expanding the latter if necessary).

50
Phew! We’ve now covered all major features of Scrivener. If you haven’t
done so already, then soon you are going to want to create your own
project and get writing. Generally you will want to create a separate
Scrivener project for each writing project.

To create a new project:

1. Select New Project… from the File menu. This will open the project
templates chooser panel.

2. Choose a project template from one of the categories (e.g. novel,

screenplay, thesis).

3. Click “Choose…” to specify a location at which to save the project.

Note: Scrivener projects are saved onto your hard drive with the file
extension “.scriv” (in the same way that Word documents are saved
with the file extension “.docx”). When you create a new project, make
sure you know where you are saving it, so that you can locate it in the
Finder. If you ever move to another computer, you’ll want to make
sure that you back up and copy your .scriv projects to your new
computer.

Before you create your own project though, click on “All Set” in the
binder, and let’s wrap up this tutorial!

One last thing to note before I leave you to it: Scrivener auto-saves your
work so you don’t have to worry about saving manually. Every time you
make an edit to the project, Scrivener schedules a save, which will occur
after a couple of seconds of inactivity. You can, however, force a save at
any time by selecting File > Save (Cmd-S).

And that’s it: you are now all set to start using Scrivener. If you want to

51
go into more depth or explore a little more, look at the “Going Further”
section. I recommend leaving that until after you’ve been using
Scrivener a little, though (or just look through the topics and read any
documents that catch your eye). Alternatively, take a look through the
user manual (Help > Scrivener Manual).

Experiment! You should be able to work out most things by playing with
the program. If you have any problems, check out our knowledge base,
or take a look at some of our tutorial videos on our 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 [email protected].

I hope you enjoy using Scrivener and find it a useful tool, and offer my
heartfelt thanks to you for choosing Scrivener (or considering it) as the
tool for your own writing.

The Page is Yours

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

52
Remember that you don’t need to read anything in this section to start
using Scrivener—”The Basics” will get you up and running with
everything you need to know. Just dip into this section whenever you
feel like learning something else that you can do in Scrivener.

There are several ways of searching in Scrivener. Most commonly, you’ll

use the following searching methods:

• When you want to open a particular document and you know its
title or some text that appears in its synopsis, use the toolbar
search field.

• When you want to search through your entire project for a phrase
or word, use Project Search (the magnifying glass in the toolbar).
The binder will be replaced with a list of search results.

⁃ Select a search result to open it in the editor. Matching

phrases or words will be highlighted.

⁃ To quickly go through the matching phrases, click into the

editor and hit Cmd-F to bring up the Find panel. This will
automatically be populated with the current search term.
You can then use this to jump through results in the text
without having to scroll through looking for highlights.

• To search for a phrase or word in a single document, use the Find

panel (Cmd-F or Edit > Find > Find…).

The different search fields are briefly described below.

Toolbar Quick Search Field

The toolbar Quick Search field works like the search field-cum-address

53
bar in Safari, in that as you type, it brings up a list of results in a menu
beneath it. Clicking on a result opens it in the editor. This searches
document titles, synopses and text, showing the top 10 results for each.

Toolbar Magnifying Glass Button

The magnifying glass button in the toolbar provides quick access to a
number of search tools. Click on the magnifying glass to bring up the
Project Search field. Or, click on the arrow next to it to bring up a menu
of other search tools.

Project Search
Project search is the most comprehensive way of searching for
something in the project. It allows you to search for documents
containing a particular word, phrase, label, keyword and more. We
already covered how to use this in the section on “The Binder” when
learning “The Basics”. Here are some extra tips:

1. Along with the magnifying glass button in the toolbar, you can
also access this from the menu via Edit > Find > Search in Project
(Shift-Cmd-F).

2. Clicking on the magnifying glass in the left of the search field that
appears when using Project Search brings up a menu containing
various options. For instance, here you can choose to search only
for keywords, or only for a particular label.

3. Holding down Option or Command on the keyboard while

clicking on an option in the “Search In” section of the menu allows
you to choose more than one option. By doing this you could, for
example, search in both synopses and notes but nowhere else.

54
To close the search results, click on the “X” in the search results header
bar:

To hide the search bar, click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar again.

Finding Text in a Document

To find text inside a document, use the Find panel, which is available
from the Edit > Find > Find… (Cmd-F) or by clicking on the arrow next to
the magnifying glass in the toolbar and choosing “Search in Document”.

Other Find Tools

Other find tools can be found in the Edit > Find menu, such as Find by
Formatting, which allows you to search the text for particular formatting
(e.g. italics).

Filtering the Outliner and Corkboard

When the focus is in the outliner or corkboard, going to Edit > Find >
Find… (Cmd-F) will bring up a filter bar at the top of the editor. You can
use this to search for items inside the outliner or corkboard. As you type
in the search field or change the filter options, the outliner or corkboard
will update to show only the documents that meet the given criteria.

55
Note:

• Click the disclosure triangle next to the search field to reveal the
options.

• Click “Done” to remove the filter.

56
As well as being able to split the editor to view more than one
document, you can open documents in their own windows, allowing
you to have as many documents in a project open on screen as you want.
We call these windows “Quick Reference” panels, because you can use
them to open, check and edit documents without affecting the main
window.

Let’s start by opening this document in a Quick Reference panel so that

we can keep it open while we open some others:

1. Click the “Quick Ref” icon in the toolbar (the one with the yellow
pencil in it).

2. Resize the window that appears as you wish, so that you can still
see the main window behind it.

You should now be reading this document inside the Quick Reference
panel. You can change the label and status associated with a document
using the pop-up buttons in the footer bar of the Quick Reference panel.
You can also view the synopsis, notes and other metadata associated
with the document using the pop-up button in the top-right of the
window.

Next, in the main menu, select Window > Float Quick Reference Panels.
This makes it so that Quick Reference panels never disappear behind the
main window. Now let’s look at some other ways of opening Quick
Reference panels.

Space Bar
1. Click on “Sunset” in the “Research” folder of the binder.

2. Hit the space bar on the keyboard.

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You should now have a second Quick Reference panel open, this one
with an image in it.

Menu
Go to Navigate > Open Quick Reference > Research > spacewalk_info.

You should now have a PDF file open in a separate window too.

Opening Multiple Panels at Once

Close all of Quick Reference panels you just opened. Once you’ve done
that:

1. Holding down Command or Shift on the keyboard, select “Sunset”

and “spacewalk_info” in the binder.

2. Drag both documents and drop them onto the “Quick Ref” (yellow
pencil) button in the toolbar.

Both documents will reopen in Quick Reference windows. Dragging

documents onto the toolbar icon allows you to open multiple items in
Quick Reference panels at once.

Bookmarks
Clicking the bookmark icon in the left of the Quick Reference footer bar
opens the project bookmarks in a sidebar. Clicking on documents in this
sidebar opens them in the Quick Reference editor on the right of the
panel.

You can therefore use Quick Reference panels as a way of referencing

58
your project bookmarks in their own window.

In “The Basics”, we saw that you can split Scrivener’s editor in two to
view two documents alongside one another. However, each of the two
editors also has a “Copyholder” associated with it.

A Copyholder is a secondary editor that can be displayed inside an

editor so that you can refer to another document. It is not a full editor in
itself, in that it cannot display the corkboard, outliner or scrivenings
modes; it can only show the content of a single document.

With two editors open each showing their Copyholders, you can view
up to four documents in the main window at the same time.

Copyholders are opened by dragging a document to an editor header

bar with the Option key held down, so let’s try that now:

1. Split the editor vertically (View > Editor Layout > Split Vertically).

2. Open another document in the right editor, e.g. by dragging any

document from the binder to its header bar, or by clicking into the
other editor and selecting another document in the binder.

3. Now pick another document and drag it to the right editor’s

header bar, holding down Option on the keyboard when you drop
it into the header. (Note that it’s best not to hold down Option
until you drop; if you hold down Option when you start dragging,
you may change what is shown in the other editor.)

The right editor will now be split in two, meaning there are now three
documents being shown in the main window. Note how the Copyholder
is not as detailed as the main editor—its header bar is narrow and it has

59
no footer bar.

Tip: Ctrl-click on the Copyholder header bar to bring up a contextual

menu that allows you to change the placement of the Copyholder.

To close a Copyholder, click on the “X” in the right of its header bar.
Alternatively, click on the button left of the “X” to close the Copyholder
and simultaneously open its document in a Quick Reference panel.

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Styles allow you to save and apply formatting to text. For example, you
could create a “Block Quote” style with an indent and a smaller font
than the rest of the text (Scrivener in fact provides a “Block Quote” style
by default).

Scrivener remembers the style associated with a section of text. This way,
if you change the formatting of a style, Scrivener can update all text that
uses that style to use the new formatting.

Applying Styles
To apply a style, do one of the following:

• Select a style from the styles menu in the format bar—the styles
menu is indicated by a pilcrow (¶) and an “a”.

• Ctrl-click on the text and choose the style from the contextual
menu that appears.

• Go to Format > Style in the main menu and choose a style.

• Go to Format > Style > Show Styles Panel and choose a style from the
panel that appears.

There are two types of style:

1. Paragraph Styles get applied to whole paragraphs, and include

paragraph formatting such as line spacing and indents. They can
optionally include character formatting such as italics and bold,
and can also optionally affect the font family and size.

⁃ Paragraph styles are indicated in menus by a pilcrow icon.

⁃ Paragraph styles that also include character formatting are

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 indicated by a pilcrow icon and an “a”.

2. Character Styles get applied only to the selected text or current

word (if there is no selection). They only include character
formatting such as italics and bold (and optionally the font family
and size). They do not include paragraph formatting such as line
spacing and indents.

⁃ Character styles are indicated in menus by an “a”.

Tip: For body text, it’s generally best to use “No Style”. In Scrivener,
unlike in many word processors, you should apply styles only to text
that you want formatted differently from everything else. If you use
styles for everything, even the main body text, then you will make it
harder for Compile to override your formatting for different output
requirements.

Creating Styles
To create a new style:

1. Create some text in the editor that uses the formatting you want to
save as a style.

2. Select some of the text.

3. Go to Format > Style > New Style From Selection. A panel will appear.

4. Enter the name of the style.

5. Choose the style type:

⁃ Save character attributes creates a character style.

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 ⁃ Save paragraph style creates a paragraph style that does not
include character formatting.

⁃ Save all formatting creates a paragraph style that includes

character formatting.

6. Choose whether to include the font family and size.

7. Check the other options.

8. Click “OK”.

The style you created is now available for use in the style menus.

Redefining Styles
Sometimes you will want to tweak a style—maybe you realise you want
your block quotes indented further, for instance. To do so, follow all the
same steps as for creating styles above, except that instead of choosing
New Style From Selection from the Style menu, choose Redefine Style From
Selection.

Once again, go through the various options and click “OK”. (Note that
when redefining a style, you cannot change a paragraph style to a
character style or vice versa.) Upon hitting “OK”, a progress bar will
appear while Scrivener goes through the entire project looking for text
that uses this style, updating any found to use the redefined formatting.

Compiling Styles
Compile formats can be set up to override styles to use different
formatting. Many of the Compile formats that are provided with
Scrivener (such as “Manuscript (Times)” and “Paperback”) are set up to

63
override the default styles such as “Block Quote”, “Body”, “Caption”,
“Heading 1” and so on. You can create your own Compile formats that
override styles, too.

You can switch to page layout view to view your text on virtual pages in
one of the following ways:

• Click on the “View” toolbar item and select “Show Page View”.

• Go to View > Text Editing > Show Page View in the main menu.

Note that the pages you see on screen may not match what you see
when the text is compiled for print or export. The concept of pages is
largely meaningless in Scrivener, because you work on the different
parts of your manuscript in smaller pieces and can completely change
the formatting and insert other elements, such as titles, during the
Compile process. The final arrangement of the pages isn’t known until
the text is compiled into one document.

Thus, unlike traditional word processors where the page layout view
shows exactly what you will see when you print your document, in
Scrivener it is just another way of viewing your text, for writers who just
feel more comfortable seeing pages fill up on the screen.

Revision mode allows you to use a different text colour while editing or
revising your text, without having to change the colour again every time
you click into a different part of a document.

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 • To enter revision mode, select one of the colours (“First Revision”,
“Second Revision” and so on) from the Format > Revision Mode
menu.

• You can set your preferred revision colours in the “Editing” pane
of the Preferences).

• In revision mode, no matter where you click in the text, when you
start typing the text will appear in the chosen revision colour.

Document links work much like web hyperlinks, except that they link to
other documents in the project.

To create a document link:

1. Select the text to which you wish to apply the text. For instance, try
highlighting “document link” in the next sentence:

⁃ This is a document link.

⁃ (You don’t have to select text. If there is no selection, the title

of the linked document will be inserted with the link applied
to it.)

2. Either:

⁃ Go to Edit > Link to Document and choose the document you

wish to reference; Or:

⁃ Drag a document from the binder onto the selected text.

3. Let’s try the latter: drag the “Revision Mode” document onto the

65
 text you selected above.

You can also choose New Link… from Edit > Link to Document to bring up a
sheet that allows you to create a new document to which to link.

Clicking on a document link opens the linked document in the other

editor by default, creating a split if necessary. (Try clicking on the “split”
in the previous sentence to see what I mean).

You can change this behaviour in the “Behaviors” pane of the

Preferences, choosing where you would like links opened.

When covering “The Basics”, we saw how we could add comments and
footnotes to text that are displayed in the inspector. Another way of
adding footnotes and comments is to insert them inline. The text of inline
annotations and footnotes appears right inside your text (as opposed to
inspector comments and footnotes, the text of which is hidden away in
the inspector).

Whether you use inspector or inline footnotes and comments is entirely

up to you (you can even use a mixture of both).

Inline footnotes and annotations look like this:

This text has a footnote after it.5

To create an inline note:

5This is a footnote. When the text is compiled, exported or printed, this

footnote will be turned into a “real” footnote (or endnote).

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 1. Select the text you wish to turn into a footnote or annotation.

2. Go to Insert > Inline Footnote or Insert > Inline Annotation in the

menu.

You can also choose one of these options with no selection and then start
typing.

You can change the colour of an annotation by clicking into it and using
the Format > Color… panel or the format bar colour button.

When you export your work, ranges of text defined as footnotes can be
turned into end-of-page footnotes, and ranges of text defined as
annotations can be turned into comments or omitted altogether.

Note: When creating inline footnotes, the grey bubble should start
exactly where you want the footnote marker to appear in the printed or
exported text.

You can set three types of word and character count targets in Scrivener:

1. Draft target: the total number of words, characters or pages you

wish to write in your manuscript.

2. Session target: the number of words or characters you wish to

write during the current writing session.

3. Document target: the number of words or characters you wish to

write in a particular document.

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Draft Target
Anything you type in documents inside the Draft folder counts towards
the Draft target. To set it:

1. Go to Project > Show Project Targets.

2. Click into the number after “of” beneath the first progress bar.

3. Type the target count.

4. Click onto “words” next to the number and choose “words”,

“chars” or “pages”.

Session Target
To set it a session target:

1. Go to Project > Show Project Targets.

2. Click into the number after “of” beneath the second progress bar.

3. Type the target count.

4. Click onto “words” next to the number and choose “words” or

“chars”.

5. Click on “Options…”.

6. Click on the “Session Target” tab and go through the options.

⁃ “Reset session count” allows you to choose to have the

session count reset at a particular time every day.

⁃ If “Count text written anywhere in the project” is ticked, the

68
 session count will increase even when typing in documents
outside the Draft folder, that are not part of your final
manuscript.

⁃ You can also choose to have session targets automatically

calculated by setting a deadline date for the Draft target in
the “Draft Target” tab and then ticking “Automatically
calculate from draft deadline” in the “Session Target” tab.
When these options are selected, you can also tell Scrivener
on which days of the week you write, so that it can adjust the
daily session target accordingly.

7. Click “OK”.

Viewing the Draft and Session Targets

When a Draft or session target is set, a progress bar appears in the search
field in Scrivener’s toolbar. If both a Draft and a session target is set, the
Draft progress bar will appear at the top of the search field and the
session progress bar will appear at the bottom; if only one target is set, it
will appear at the bottom.

Moving the mouse over the search field shows the current Draft and
session count.

You can also go to Project > Show Project Targets… to view the targets in
the floating panel.

Document Targets
To set a document target:

69
 1. In the footer view of a text document, click on the target icon.

2. Set a target in the panel that appears.

The target button in the footer view will be replaced with a progress bar
showing the current progress for the document. You can click on the
progress bar to edit or remove the target.

Scriptwriting mode is available from Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode
(Cmd-8).

When in script mode, the footer view will show information on the
various available script elements.

• Select Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode > Screenplay from the
main menu now.

⁃ The word and character count will disappear and you will
see a pop-up menu appear on the right of the footer view
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.

• Try selecting different elements from the pop-up menu on the right
of the footer view.

The above text is automatically reformatted to the script element you

select each time.

You can switch between script elements using the tab and enter keys:

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 • Hitting enter at the end of the line will take you to the next
element.

• Hitting tab at the beginning of the line will toggle between

different elements.

• For some elements, hitting tab at the end of a line will take you to
a different element on the next line from hitting enter. For other
elements, hitting tab might insert characters.

⁃ For example, hitting tab at the end of a dialogue line will

move to a parenthetical line, whereas hitting tab in a scene
heading line will insert a hyphen, ready for you to type the
location.

The footer view updates to show what will happen if you press the tab
or enter keys (which will move you to the next script element).

Note that scriptwriting mode is saved on a document-by-document

basis, so you can switch between documents that use script formatting
and documents that don’t. Documents using scriptwriting mode have a
yellow icon to distinguish them from other text documents.

To turn off script mode, us the Script Mode menu item again, deselecting
it.

A number of script formats are provided, such as screenplay, stage play

and comic script formats. You can also create your own via Format >
Scriptwriting > Script Settings…

By default, composition mode uses “typewriter scrolling” (you’ll be

notified of this every time you enter composition mode until you tick
“Do not show again”). With this enabled, newly-typed text will remain
in the vertical centre of the screen so that you don’t have to crick your

71
neck by looking down all the time.

Typewriter scrolling works like this:

• When you type text in a new document, when there is enough text
so that the line you are typing on would be lower than the middle
of the screen, it is automatically scrolled up to keep it centred.

• If you edit text elsewhere on the screen, typewriter scrolling occurs

wherever you type. This way, the text doesn’t jump around
unexpectedly every time you fix a typo.

• When you want typewriter scrolling to occur in the middle of the

screen again, hit Cmd-J (Edit > Find > Jump to Selection).

You can turn typewriter scrolling off by going to View > Text Editing >
Typewriter Scrolling (Ctrl-Cmd-T). Using the same menu command, you
can also turn it on for the editor when not in composition mode.

To test this feature out, enter composition mode (Opt-Cmd-F) and type
some text inside this document (ensuring typewriter scrolling is turned
on). Do that here, making sure you type enough text so that it wraps
across more than one line:

Your text:

Keep typing so that there is enough text to fill the height of the screen.

Next, try moving the cursor into some text in the bottom quarter of the
screen and type more than a line of text. You’ll see that the typing line
stays at the same position.

Now, hit Cmd-J and carry on typing, once more making sure that you
type enough text to wrap over another line or two. See how typing now

72
sticks to the centre of the screen? As the text wraps to another line, it
moves up to keep the line in which you are typing at the same position.

Tip: You can change the typewriter scrolling position via the “Editing”
pane of the Preferences.

73
Collections provide a way of keeping different lists of binder documents
around. There are two types of collection:

1. Arbitrary collections. You can add any documents you want to

these and drag and drop to have them in any order.

⁃ Suppose you are reading through your manuscript and

realise that a number of sections have problems in them that
you are going to need to solve. You could create a collection
called “Problems” and add any problematic documents to it.
You could then open that collection to work through the
problematic documents.

2. Search collections allow you to save a search and re-run it at any

time.

⁃ Suppose you are writing a novel and have used labels to

record the point of view of each chapter. You could set up
different search collections for each point-of-view character.
Each search collection would search for the character name
in the label. You could then look open one of the collections
to see only the chapters or scenes for a particular character.

Opening Collections
In the toolbar:

• Click on the “View” button on the left.

• Select “Show Collections”.

⁃ An area will appear at the top of the binder containing two

rows (tabs), “Binder” and “Search Results”.

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 • Click on the “Search Results” row.

See what happened? The last search you ran gets run again, and its
results appear where the binder was.

Click on the “Binder” tab to return to the binder before continuing.

Arbitrary Collections
To create an arbitrary collection:

• Ctrl-click on the header view to bring up the header bar menu.

• Select “Lock in Place”:

The header bar will turn pink, indicating that the editor is now “locked”.
When an editor is locked, clicks in the binder will have no effect. Try

75
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. We have locked the editor so that you can still read this document
while trying out the following steps.

• Hold down the Command key on the keyboard and select several
documents in the binder.

• Once you have selected five or six (it doesn’t matter which), click
on “+” button in the “Collections” bar at the very top of the
binder:

The binder will be replaced by a flat list showing only the documents
you selected. You haven’t moved those documents—they are all still in
their rightful places in the binder. No, you’ve just created a collection.
When you created it, the selected documents were automatically added
to it.

To see what I mean click on one of the documents in the collection list
and go to Navigate > Reveal in Binder. This shows you where the
document is located in the binder.

Click back on the collection tab that was created once you’ve tried this,
to return to the collection.

• You can drag and drop the collection rows into any order you
want.

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 • You can drag and drop documents inside the collection list to
reorder them. (This has no effect on the order in the binder.)

• You can rename the collection to anything you want, and you can
change its colour by clicking on the little chevron next to the
collection name:

Go ahead and try changing the title and colour of the collection you
created.

Let’s add some more documents to the collection:

• Click back on the “Binder” tab and select some different

documents in the binder.

• Once you’ve selected some documents, drag and drop them onto
the collection tab.

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 • Click the collection tab again to return to the collection—the
documents you dragged onto the tab are now in the collection too.
(Note: If you hold the mouse over the tab for a moment before you
drop, the collection will open automatically, allowing you to drop
the documents in a particular place in the collection list.)

Tip: If you hold the Option key down while dragging a folder onto a
collection, then all its subdocuments will get added to the collection
too.

Search Collections
Let’s create a collection of all documents with their status marked “To
Do”:

1. Open project search by clicking on the magnifying glass in the

toolbar.

2. In the search field that appears above the binder, search for “To
Do”. The binder will be replaced with the purple search results list.

3. Click on the magnifying glass icon on the left of the search field
and select “Status” from the menu that appears. The search results
will update to show only documents with a status of “To Do”.

4. Click on the the magnifying glass in the search field again, and
this time select “Save Search As Collection…” from the bottom of
the menu.

5. 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

78
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, just as you
can with arbitrary collections. The magnifying glass icon on the left of
the tab indicates that this is a search collection.

Search collections are different to arbitrary collections in that you can’t

add documents to them or move them around. Instead, every time you
click on a search collection, the search gets run again. To see what I
mean:

1. Click back on the “Binder” tab.

2. Click on the “START HERE” document at the top of the binder

and hit the space bar to bring up a Quick Reference panel.

3. Click on the “No Status” pop-up button in the bottom-right of the

Quick Reference panel and choose “To Do” from the status menu.

4. Repeat this with a couple of other documents if you like.

5. Now click on the “To Do” collection again.

The “START HERE” document is now part of the “To Do” collection.

Deleting Collections
To delete a collection, simply select its tab and then click on the “-”
button in the “Collections” header bar (you will be prompted to confirm
the deletion). Deleting a collection has no effect on its constituent
documents—they are not deleted and remain in their place in the binder.

Closing Collections
You can close a collection and return to the binder at any time by

79
clicking the “X” button in the left of the collection header bar:

You can now unlock the editor either by Ctrl-clicking in the editor
header bar again and deselecting “Lock in Place”. You can also hide the
collections pane by choosing “Hide Collections” from the “View”
toolbar button menu.

In “The Basics”, we learned about how Bookmarks can be used to store

references to other documents. In this section, we’ll learn how to use
them in combination with Quick Reference Panels as a powerful way of
managing project-wide notes.

Note: Be sure to read the section on Quick Reference Panels before

reading this section!

First, we’re going to create a folder in the binder that we’ll use to store
project notes:

1. In the binder, select the “Research” folder.

2. Click the “new folder” button in the binder footer bar (the icon of a
folder with a “+” inside it).

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 3. Name the new folder “Notes”.

4. Ensuring the new “Notes” folder is selected, go to Edit > Move >
Move Left. This will move the folder so that it is on the same level
as and directly below the “Research” folder.

5. If you want, give the folder a custom notebook icon by going to

Documents > Change Icon.

Next, we’ll add some notes to the folder and then add them to the
project bookmarks:

1. With the folder selected, click the “+” button in the binder footer to
create a couple of new documents inside it. Name them anything
you like, and feel free to type in them.

2. Select both documents and drag them onto the red “Bookmarks”
icon in the toolbar. This will add them to the project bookmarks
list. (Click on the “Bookmarks” toolbar icon to check that the
documents have been added.)

Now we’ll open up a Quick Reference panel and navigate between our
notes:

1. Select one of the documents you just created and then click the
“Quick Ref” toolbar icon, so that the document is opened in its
own Quick Reference panel.

⁃ Alternatively, drag the document and drop it on the “Quick

Ref” icon—this will open it in a Quick Reference panel
without also opening it in the editor.

2. Click the bookmark icon in the left of the footer bar in the Quick
Reference panel. This will open a sidebar showing all project

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 bookmarks, including the two note documents you just added.

You can now select documents in the Bookmarks sidebar to navigate

between them in the Quick Reference panel. This is a great way of
referring to notes and research in their own window. And of course,
you’re not limited to adding documents only from your “Notes” folder
—you can add documents from anywhere in the project. (You can also
refer to project bookmarks in the inspector, as we saw in “The Basics”.)

To create a new document and add it to the project bookmarks in a

single step:

1. Click the “+” button in the footer bar beneath the Bookmarks
sidebar of the Quick Reference window. A drop-down panel will
appear, asking you where you want the new document to be
created.

2. From the pop-up menu, choose the “Notes” folder you created
earlier, and then click on “OK”.

⁃ If you tick “Don’t ask again”, from now on when you create
a new document in the Bookmarks sidebar of a Quick
Reference panel, you won’t see this drop-down panel and
the document will automatically be created in the folder you
previously selected. You can change these settings at any
time in the “Special Folders” area of Project Settings
(available from the Project menu).

3. Name the new document.

A new document will be created inside the “Notes” folder, and it will
automatically be added to the Project Bookmarks. You can drag items
around in the Bookmarks sidebar of the Quick Reference panel to
reorder them (this only reorders the Bookmarks, and not the placement

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of documents in the binder).

Note: Anything you add to the “Notes” folder in the binder will not
automatically be added to the Project Bookmarks, because you can
bookmark anything in the project. So if you create notes in the “Notes”
folder in the binder and want them added to the Project Bookmarks, be
sure to drag them to the “Bookmarks” toolbar icon or Ctrl-click on
them and add them to the bookmarks from the contextual menu that
appears.

Using a QuickReference panel in combination with Project Bookmarks is

therefore a great way of creating and keeping track of notes on your
project. And you can remove notes from the Bookmarks list once you’re
finished with them while keeping them in the binder for future
reference.

Splitting Documents
Suppose you start out creating a single document for each chapter. Then,
after your first draft, you realise that you want to break your chapters up
into smaller sections, so that you can restructure more easily. No
problem.

To split the text of a document into smaller pieces:

1. Click into the text at the point you wish to split it apart.

2. In the main menu, go to Documents > Split > at Selection. The

document will be split in two at the cursor point.

Documents > Split > with Selection as Title works much the same way,
except you select a range of text before using it. The selected text will

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become the title of the newly-created document.

Merging Documents
The opposite of splitting documents is merging them. If you have a
number of small documents in the binder that you want to merge into a
single document:

1. Select the documents you wish to merge in the binder.

2. From the main menu, choose Documents > Merge.

You aren’t limited to displaying the contents of only one group in the
corkboard or outliner—you can show the subdocuments of several
groups by “stacking” them. This is really easy to do:

1. Split the editor horizontally or vertically.

2. Click into the other editor to give it the focus.

3. Select “The Basics” in the binder.

4. Switch to corkboard mode if necessary.

5. Hold down the Command key and click on “Going Further” in the
binder.

6. With the Command key still held down, click on “Tips” in the
binder.

Now scroll down through the corkboard. Note how the subdocuments

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of each of the folders you selected are all displayed on the corkboard,
with a dividing line between each section.

When viewing a stack of groups in the corkboard like this, the footer
view shows a button that allows you to chose whether to display the
sections as a grid (the default), in rows, or in columns:

Try clicking on each of the different options to see how they affect the
corkboard.

Now try switching to outliner mode. You’ll see the three groups you
selected in the binder, and you can expand them to view their contents.

The outliner and corkboard are not only great organisational tools: they
can also be used to navigate, just like the binder, using the “Selection
Affects Other Editor” tool:

1. Split the editor if necessary.

2. In the other editor, load any folder and switch to either corkboard
or outliner mode.

Note the button containing an arrow pointing out of a box in the footer
bar:

That’s the “Selection Affects Other Editor” button. Click on it now. You
will notice that it turns blue, to indicate that it is on. When this button is
on, selecting documents in the corkboard or outliner will open them in

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the other editor if there is a split.

Try clicking on one of the documents in the corkboard or outliner, and

you will see that it is opened in this editor (come back here afterwards!).
By turning this feature on, then, you can use the corkboard or outliner to
navigate through the other editor.

Click the button again to deselect it (it will turn back grey to indicate
that “Selection Affects Other Editor” has been turned off).

Navigating in Copyholders
Note: be sure to go through the section covering Copyholders in
“Referring to More Documents” before reading this section.

You can use this same button to navigate documents using Copyholders.
Try this:

1. Holding down Option on the keyboard, drag one of the

documents in the corkboard or outliner and drop it onto the
header bar above the corkboard or outliner. A Copyholder split
will open within the other editor.

2. Now click on the “Selection Affects Other Editor” button again so

that it turns blue. Then click it a second time. Now that a
Copyholder is open, it will remain blue on this second click, but
the icon will change to show the arrow pointing into the box. This
indicates that selection will now be opened in the Copyholder
rather than in the other editor.

3. Now try selecting documents in the corkboard or outliner—see

how they get opened in the Copyholder?

Hopefully you will see how useful this could be. For instance, here’s a

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setup I use quite regularly:

• Binder open on left.

• Editor split vertically.

• Right editor in outliner mode with its Copyholder open at the

bottom

• “Selection Affects” button set to affect the Copyholder.

• Right editor Locked in Place (so that any clicks in the binder only
affect the left editor).

With this arrangement, I can use the binder to navigate the editor on the
left, and the outliner to navigate the Copyholder below it, arranging and
editing my manuscript on the left while navigating through and
referring to research and notes on the right.

Scrivener’s corkboard is not like a real corkboard: on a real corkboard,

you can pin cards anywhere; in Scrivener, the corkboard is a linear list of
of a group’s subdocuments laid out in rows. However, there is a
freeform mode, which allows you to place cards anywhere and
experiment.

You switch between freeform and regular modes using the button on the
right of the corkboard’s footer bar:

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(You can also enter freeform mode by going to View > Corkboard Options >
Freeform.)

Try this now:

1. Split the editor if necessary.

2. In the other editor, select a folder in the binder and switch to

corkboard mode.

3. Click on the freeform mode button in the footer bar, as indicated in

the image above.

You can now drag cards around and drop them anywhere. (Select
multiple cards by clicking and dragging the mouse to create a marquee
rectangle and enclosing the cards you wish to select.)

Dragging the cards around in freeform mode has no effect on the order
of their associated documents in the binder (unlike in regular mode). If
you arrange the cards in an order you would like to be used in the
binder, though, you can click the “Commit” button in the footer bar and
Scrivener will change the order of the documents in the binder to best fit
their arrangement on the freeform corkboard.

Feel free to play around with the cards (but don’t hit “Commit” unless
you want to mess up the order of the tutorial!), and once you have
finished, return to regular corkboard mode by clicking on the grid icon
on the left of the button you used to switch to freeform mode (or go to
View > Corkboard Options and deselect Freeform).

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In “The Basics”, we covered how coloured labels can be assigned to
documents, and how they can be used for anything. There’s a cool way
of viewing labels that we didn’t cover when looking at the basics,
though: labels can be displayed in threads on the corkboard view. The
easiest way to understand how this works is to see it in action:

1. Split the editor if necessary.

2. In the other editor, load the “Writing and Editing” folder under
“Going Further”.

3. Switch to corkboard mode. You should see several cards on the

board.

4. From the main menu, select View > Corkboard Options > Show Label
Colors Along Edges so that you can see the label colours in the
corkboard. (You don’t need to do this, but it’s useful for this
demonstration.)

5. Either select View > Corkboard Options > Arrange by Label from the
main menu, or click on this button in the footer bar:

See what happens? Coloured lines appear stretching the width of the
corkboard, each representing a label. Each card is placed on the line that
corresponds to the label associated with its document, in the same order
as it appears in the binder.

• Drag cards from left to right to change their positions in the binder.

• Drag cards up and down to change their labels.

• Switch between horizontal and vertical lines using the button in

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 the footer bar.

If you’re writing a novel and use labels to keep track of the point-of-
view character or subplot for each document, this is a great way of
viewing all the threads in a group. (And combined with viewing
multiple groups, you could even view threads for the entire
manuscript.)

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Importing Files
To bring in writing and research from other apps:

1. In Scrivener’s binder, select the folder into which you wish to

import the new files. Or, select the file under which you wish the
files to be imported. (If you select a folder, the imported files will
be placed inside it as the last items; if you select a file, imported
files will be placed directly beneath it.)

2. Go to File > Import > Files… in the main menu.

3. In the file browser window that appears, select the files that you
want to import.

4. Click “Import”.

All selected files and folders will be imported, including subdirectories,

reproducing the file structure from the Finder in Scrivener’s binder.
Imported text files will be converted so that they can be edited inside
Scrivener. All other files will be copied into Scrivener.

Note: If you selected a folder or file contained inside the “Draft” folder
in step (1) above, you will only have the option of importing text file
types from the file browser, because the “Draft” folder only supports
text files.

Scrivener can import many different file types:

• Word documents (.docx, .doc), rich text files (.rtf, .rtfd), plain text
files (.txt), OpenOffice documents (.odt) and Final Draft files (.fdx)
are imported as text that can be edited inside Scrivener.

⁃ Note that we are unable to support the Apple Pages file

format because Apple has not made the format public. To

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 import documents from Pages, first export them from Pages
as .docx files, and then import the .docx files into Scrivener.

• Image, movie, sound and PDF files are copied into Scrivener and
can be viewed in its editor.

• All other files are copied into Scrivener and are displayed in the
editor using macOS’s Quick Look viewer.

Importing Web Pages

You can import web pages by selecting Import > Web Page… from the File
menu.

Import and Split

Perhaps you have already written a long document and you want to
bring it into Scrivener and break it up into smaller sections. You could
do that by importing it following the steps above and then using the
Split at Selection feature. Another option is to use Import and Split:

1. From the main menu, select Files > Import > Import and Split…

2. In the browser that appears, select the file that you wish to import.

3. In the “Sections are separated by” box, enter the text that
represents splits in your document. For instance, you could use
Insert > Break > Page Break to enter a page break character in here
and have your document split at each new page. Or you could
enter a couple of return characters, or a separator character you
have used in the text (e.g. “#”).

4. For Final Draft files, you can choose which script element to split

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 sections at—you will usually want to leave this as “Scene
Heading”.

5. Click “Import”.

Your text will now be imported as multiple documents. Go through

them and do any necessary clean-up. You can split them further using
the Split at Selection feature.

There are three ways of getting work out in Scrivener:

1. Compile the Draft folder into a single document for printing or

exporting.

2. Print the contents of the current editor using File > Print Current
Document…

3. Export individual documents from the binder—this is what we

will look at here.

Exporting allows you to get anything you have brought into Scrivener
out again, or to export individual text files to popular word processor
formats. To export:

1. In the binder, select all of the files you want to export.

2. From the main menu, select File > Export > Files…

3. If multiple files were selected, you will be prompted to enter the

name of a directory that will be created in the Finder to hold the
files.

4. Choose your preferred text file format from the pop-up menu next

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 to “Export text files as”.

⁃ Note: This option is available even if you are only exporting

image or media files. In that case, it only has any effect if you
choose to export the notes associated with such files too.

5. Go through the “Metadata” and “Options” settings.

6. Click “Export”.

The selected files will be exported with the binder structure intact—
folders in the binder will become folders in the Finder.

Scrivener is also available for iOS so that you can write and structure
while on your iPhone or iPad. The iOS version is available as a separate
purchase from the App Store. Below we cover how to sync between
platforms for those who also own the iOS version. If you don’t have
Scrivener for iPhone or iPad, you can ignore this section.

Setting Up Dropbox on Your Mac

You need to store any projects you wish to sync on Dropbox. You can get
a free Dropbox account from http://www.getdropbox.com. You’ll need
to download the Dropbox app and install it on your Mac. Assuming you
have Dropbox installed on your Mac:

1. Locate any Scrivener projects you want to sync in the Finder.

⁃ Tip: You can easily locate any project by opening it in

Scrivener and then selecting File > Show Project in Finder from
the main menu.

2. Ensure any projects you want to sync are closed. This is very

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 important—if you leave any projects open in Scrivener while
moving them into Dropbox, you could end up corrupting them
and losing data.

3. In the Finder, open another window (File > New Finder Window in
the Finder menu) and open your Dropbox folder in it (select
“Dropbox” in the Finder sidebar).

4. Create a folder in which to store the projects you wish to sync with
iOS. To sync, you must have a folder on Dropbox that you use only
for sharing Scrivener projects between devices. The standard
folder that the iOS version uses is /Apps/Scrivener, so if you want
to use that, inside the Dropbox folder you would create a new
folder named “Apps” (if it doesn’t already exist) and then inside
that you would create a folder called “Scrivener”. However, you
can create and use any folder you want for this, just as long as you
only use it for storing Scrivener projects. (The reason you should
only store Scrivener projects inside it is that everything in this
folder will be synced to your iOS device, so anything else in the
folder would take up unnecessary space on your device.)

5. Move the projects you located in (1) into the folder you created in
(4), for instance by dragging and dropping them.

6. At this point, you can reopen the projects (e.g. by double-clicking

on them in the Finder).

When creating a new project, if you want to sync it with iOS, be sure to
save it into the Dropbox folder you created in (4) when asked where to
choose a location for the new project. (If you don’t, you can still move it
later using the steps above.)

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Setting Up Dropbox on Your iPad or iPhone
Next, open Scrivener on your iPhone and do the following:

1. Tap the “sync” icon at the top of the projects screen and select Link
Dropbox. As long as you have an internet connection, this will
bring up the Dropbox sign-in window, allowing you to sign in to
your Dropbox account.

2. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll be asked to choose a folder on

Dropbox with which to sync your Scrivener projects. Be sure to
choose the folder you set up in step (4) of “Setting Up Dropbox on
Your Mac”.

⁃ Note: You can change this folder at any time by tapping

“Edit” in the nav bar at the top of the projects screen, then
tapping the gear icon in the footer bar that appears and
selecting Dropbox Settings.

3. Once you’ve chosen a folder, Scrivener will sync with Dropbox,

downloading any files you have placed in your shared Dropbox
folder. Projects stored on Dropbox will appear in their own section
at the top of the projects list.

When you create a new project on iOS, you will be asked where to save
it. If you choose to save it to Dropbox, after you sync, it will
automatically appear in the Dropbox folder you created on your Mac, so
that you can open the project there, too.

Making Changes to Projects

Now that you have your project on both your Mac and iOS device, you
need to make sure it is synced between devices whenever you make

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changes. Here’s how:

1. On macOS, the Dropbox app you downloaded from dropbox.com

is always running in the background. Whenever a file is changed
in the Dropbox folder, the Dropbox app automatically uploads it to
the Dropbox servers. Whenever the Dropbox app detects new files
on the Dropbox servers, it automatically downloads them to the
Dropbox folder on your Mac. Whenever it is uploading or
downloading files, it shows a “syncing” badge in the Dropbox icon
in the menu bar:

2. When you’ve finished editing on your Mac and want to open the
project on iOS, it is very important that you wait for the “syncing”
badge to disappear from the Dropbox icon in the Mac menu bar.
Only when it disappears have all the files uploaded to the
Dropbox servers. Until then, there is no way for the iOS version to
download all of your changes, so if you don’t wait, you could end
up with an incomplete sync and files missing from your project.

3. Once you’re sure Dropbox has finished syncing on your Mac, on

your iOS device, open Scrivener and tap the “sync” icon in the nav
bar of the projects screen. A progress bar will appear while the
updated files download.

4. Once the sync has finished, you are ready to open and edit the
project on your iOS device.

5. When you’ve finished making edits on iOS, tap the “sync” icon
once again in the projects screen. (The sync icon is also available in
the nav bar while editing documents inside a project, and in the
share button in the footer bar of the editor.) Once again, a progress

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 bar will appear, this time to indicate that your changed files are
being uploaded to the Dropbox servers. Wait for the sync to
complete.

6. When you return to your Mac, if the project is still open, a message
should appear telling you that changes have been made and
asking if you want to sync them. Before clicking to start the sync,
though, make sure that the Dropbox app has finished
downloading all the changed files. As you did before syncing on
iOS, check the Dropbox icon in the menu bar on your Mac and do
not tell Scrivener to sync the changes until the “syncing” badge
has disappeared. Once you are sure Dropbox has finished syncing,
tell Scrivener to sync the changes. The project will close and
reopen automatically, now with all the changes you made on iOS
in place.

⁃ If you don’t see a message telling you that there are changes,
you can go to File > Sync > with Mobile Devices to force
Scrivener to look for changes.

⁃ If the project was closed, only reopen it when you are sure
Dropbox has finished syncing. When you open the project,
all of the changes you made on iOS will be there.

Resolving Sync Problems

If your iOS device tells you that a project you downloaded from your
Mac seems to be invalid, it is most likely because you didn’t let Dropbox
on macOS finish syncing all files before you downloaded them to iOS. To
solve this issue, ensure the Dropbox app has finished syncing on your
Mac, and then tap “sync” again on iOS to download the rest of the files.

Try not to edit a project on both devices without syncing, as this can lead

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to conflicts. For instance, suppose you make some changes on iOS, and
then return to your Mac and make some changes to the project without
first tapping “sync” in iOS and waiting for Dropbox to download the
changes to your Mac. In this case, conflicts will arise. Scrivener will do
its best to resolve such conflicts, but it’s always better to try to avoid this
happening.

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You can assign any file or folder a custom icon via Documents > Change
Icon. Some of the documents in this project have custom icons assigned,
such as the folders using yellow book icons and the “START HERE”
document, among others.

To see this feature in action, let’s try setting up another root folder in
which we will store information about characters:

1. Lock the editor so that this document stays on screen (Ctrl-click in

the header bar and select “Lock In Place”).

2. Select the “Research” folder in the binder.

3. Click on the “add folder” button in the footer bar at the bottom of
the binder.

4. A new folder is created inside the “Research” folder. Rename the

new folder “Characters”.

5. From the Edit menu, choose Move > Left. Your new folder is now a
root folder—that is, it is now as far left as it can go, on the same
level as the Draft, Research and Trash folders.

Our new “Characters” folder looks fairly generic so far, and this is where
the custom icon feature comes in. In our example, we are going to use
our new folder to store notes about different characters in a novel, so we
want to assign it an appropriate icon:

1. Select the “Characters” folder.

2. Go to Documents > Change Icon (or Ctrl-click on the folder and

select “Change Icon” from the contextual menu).

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 3. Choose Characters > Photo (or any icon you want).

If you create a Scrivener project from one of the templates that are
provided (such as the novel template), you will find folders in the binder
that have been created and customised in just this way.

(You can unlock the editor now.)

Note: Make sure you go through the Custom Icons section before
reading this section, so that you have a “Characters” folder set up.

One of the philosophies behind Scrivener is that it doesn’t force you into
a particular workflow. You can write any sort of long-form text in
Scrivener, setting up your project to fit the task at hand. Therefore,
Scrivener doesn’t assume that everyone writing a novel (for example)
uses character sheets to keep track of character information, or prompt
sheets for information about locations. Instead, Scrivener provides the
means to set up “document templates” that can generate items such as
character sheets for those who use them.

Document templates allow you to set up a document in the project and

use it as the basis for creating new documents. Let’s try creating a couple
to see how this works.

1. Go to the Project menu and select New From Template. Note how
there is just a dummy menu item in there saying “No templates
folder set for project”.

1. Click the arrow next to the green “+” icon in the toolbar. You’ll see
there are three items in there: “New Text”, “New Folder” and
“Import Web Page” (which will be disabled if a document
contained in the Draft folder is selected in the binder, because you
can’t import web pages into the text-only Draft folder). Don’t

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 select anything—we’re just looking at what’s there at the moment.

We’re going to add a couple of different types of document to these

menus.

Next, take a look inside the “Research” folder in the binder (expand it if
necessary by clicking the disclosure triangle next to it). Inside it you will
find a “Sheets” folder, which contains two documents, “Character Sheet”
and “Location Sheet”. Take a look at these documents. They contain text
that could be used for very basic character or location sheets, which you
might fill in for each character or location you are going to write about in
a novel.

These documents are just regular text documents—you can type

whatever you want in there. To see what I mean, select the “Location”
document and then click on “+” in the toolbar so that a new blank
document gets created. Name it to anything you want, and then type
something inside the document.

Setting a Templates Folder

Now we’re going to tell Scrivener that the documents inside the
“Sheets” folder should be treated as document templates—that is, that
we want to be able to create new documents based on them:

1. Go to Project > Project Settings…

2. Select “Special Folders” in the sidebar.

3. Under “Templates Folder”, select the “Sheets” folder from the pop-
up menu.

The icon of the “Sheets” folder will change to be a white “T” against a
blueprint background, and the “T” will also appear in the corner of each

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document inside it. This indicates that the folder is now acting as the
project’s templates folder and that anything inside it can be used as the
basis for a new document.

What does this mean? Let’s try returning to the menus we looked at a
moment ago:

1. Click the “Characters” folder with the custom icon that you
created when looking at Custom Icons. It should currently be
empty.

2. Go to the Project menu and select New From Template again. You’ll
notice that it’s no longer empty—it now shows the contents of the
“Sheets” templates folder.

3. From the menu, select “Character Sheet”. A new document will be

created inside the “Characters” folder—a document identical to
the “Character Sheet” document in the templates folder. Change
the title and edit the text in the document itself.

4. Now click the arrow next to the green “+” button in the toolbar.
This time there will be more items in the menu that appears—the
contents of our templates folder is there, too. This time choose
“Location Sheet”.

The two new documents you just created are copies of the documents in
the templates folder. And that’s really all the templates folder is—
somewhere for you to put documents that you want to use as the basis
for other documents, and which, in combination with the New From
Template menu, makes it very easy to create copies of those documents
anywhere you want in the project.

Set Folders to Use Templates by Default

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That “Characters” folder we created earlier is there to hold character
sheets for all the characters in our novel. At the moment, every time we
want to add a new character sheet to it, we have to use the New From
Template menu. There’s an easier way, though:

1. Select the “Characters” folder in the binder.

2. Go to Documents > Default Template for Subdocuments in the main

menu.

3. Select “Character Sheet”.

Now try pressing the green “+” button in the toolbar or the “+” button
at the bottom of the binder. See what happens? The “Characters” folder
now automatically uses the “Character Sheet” template whenever you
create a new document inside it, without you having to use the New
From Template menu each time

Scrivener comes with a range of project templates that can be used as the
basis for new projects. To create a new project from a template:

1. From the main menu, choose File > New Project…

2. In the templates chooser panel that appears, select a category in

the sidebar.

3. Select one of the templates in the category.

4. Click “Choose…”

Note that the “Blank” project type is not technically a template. “Blank”
creates an empty project that is not based on a template. I created all of
the project templates (“Novel”, “Novel (with Parts)”, “Research

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Proposal”, “Comic Script” and so on) by starting from a blank project.
For each one, I then added some extra folders with some custom icons,
set up some document templates, changed a few project settings, and
then saved the resulting project as a template which I then included with
Scrivener.

You can create your own project templates in the same way. Here’s how:

1. Create a new project, either from the “Blank” template or from any
other template (you might just want to customise one of the
existing templates).

⁃ Tip: When basing your template on an existing project

template, hold down the Option key when clicking
“Choose…” to create the project. This prevents Scrivener
from auto-filling title pages and such with information from
Contacts.

2. Edit the project so that it contains all the elements and settings you
want in new projects created from your template.

3. Select Save As Template… from the File menu.

4. From the “New Project Template” panel that appears, enter a title
and description for the new template, choose a category and icon,
then click on “OK”.

5. Go to File > New From Template… 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
so wish.

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Scrivener projects are saved on disk as files with the extension “.scriv”
and are actually package files. A “package file” is a file that is really a
folder, but which looks like, and is treated like, a file by the macOS file
system.

To see what I mean, try the following:

1. Ctrl-click on a .scriv file in the Finder.

2. Select “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu that

appears.

The Finder now shows the innards of your .scriv package. Take a look
inside the “Files/Data” folder, for instance.

You will (reassuringly, I hope) discover that all of your work is stored as
multiple RTF and XML files inside various subfolders. This means that
even in the worst possible crash case, if a .scriv file became hopelessly
corrupted (although I hope this will never happen), you would still be
able to open and edit all of your work in another program that supports
RTF files.

That said, you should not edit the RTF files inside a .scriv package in any
other program if you intend to keep using them inside Scrivener, as this
may cause problems in Scrivener. Use the Export Files feature if you want
to get your individual files out for use with another program.

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Changing the Default Formatting for New Documents
You can change the default formatting used for new documents like this:

1. In the editor, set up some text with the formatting you want to use
for all new documents, and ensure the cursor is inside it.

2. From the main menu, select Scrivener > Preferences…

3. Select “Editing” in the toolbar.

4. Select the “Formatting” tab.

5. Click the “Use Formatting in Current Editor” button.

From now on, whenever you create a new blank document and start
typing, the text will the formatting you set up in (1).

Alternatively, instead of setting up the text in the editor, you can set the
formatting in the text area of the Editing > Formatting pane in the
Preferences.

Changing the Default Formatting for Only a Single

Project
Sometimes, you may have a project that needs to use different default
formatting from other projects. You can set this up as follows:

1. From the main menu, select Project > Project Settings…

2. Select “Formatting” in the sidebar.

3. Set up the text in the “Main Text Formatting” text area, or click on
the “Use Current” button to use the formatting in the current

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 editor.

NOTE: This tutorial is set up to use this option.

Applying Default Formatting to Existing Documents

Setting the default formatting in the Preferences or Project Settings has
no effect on existing documents. (Scrivener could ruin special formatting
you have applied if it changed the formatting for all your documents
automatically every time you changed the preferences.) To apply the
default formatting to existing documents:

1. In the binder, select the documents you want to update.

2. From the main menu, select Documents > Convert > Text to Default
Formatting…

3. Check the options in the panel that appears and then click “OK”.

To insert an image into your manuscript:

1. Click into the editor and place the cursor where you would like the
image to be inserted.

2. Go to Insert > Image From File… in the main menu.

3. Select the image file you would like to insert.

Alternatively, drag an image from the Finder (or an image file from the
binder) into the editor.

Note that you do not use File > Import > Files… or drag images into the

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binder from the Finder to import images. Importing images into the
binder creates an image document. Image documents are used for research
or reference and are not part of your manuscript.

Sometimes you will want numbers to appear in the text whose value
may change depending on the arrangement of the text. For instance, you
might want to title a document “Chapter 1”, but if you move it later, it
might become “Chapter 2”. For this, you can use “placeholders”.

To insert an auto-number placeholder, go to Insert > Auto-Number in the

main menu and pick a number type. A tag will be inserted into the text.
For example, if you select “1, 2, 3, 4, 5…”, the following tag will be
inserted:

This tag will be replaced with a number when using Compile. There are
many other placeholders you can use in Scrivener—a full list is available
from Help > List of All Placeholders…

You can use placeholders in the text, in document titles, or in your own
Compile formats. Many of the Compile formats provided with Scrivener
use placeholders to insert chapter numbering. To see this, try the
following:

1. Go to File > Compile…

2. Select “Manuscript (Times)” from the Formats sidebar.

3. Click on the “+” button in the footer.

4. Select “Duplicate & Edit Format…” from the menu that appears.
The Compile window will change to show the options for creating

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 a format.

5. Ensure “Section Layouts” is selected in the sidebar.

6. Select “Chapter Heading” in the section layouts list.

7. Select the “Title Options” tab.

You will see that the “Title Prefix” text box contains the following text:

Chapter Eins

This is what adds “Chapter One”, “Chapter Two” and so on to the start
of each chapter when you use the “Manuscript (Times)” format to
compile your manuscript.

By default, Scrivener’s editor uses a “fixed width”, so that when the

editor is expanded beyond a certain width, the text will appear as a
column in its centre. If you would prefer the text to take up the full
width of the editor, you can turn this behaviour off via the Preferences:

1. Go to Scrivener > Preferences… in the main window.

2. Select the “Appearance” tab at the top.

3. Select “Main Editor” from the sidebar.

4. Deselect “Use fixed width editor”.

Sometimes you will want to navigate through the binder while keeping

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the document in the editor pinned in place. “Lock in Place” allows this:

1. Ctrl-click on the header view to bring up the header bar menu.

2. Select “Lock in Place”.

The header bar will turn pink, indicating that the editor is now “locked”.
When an editor is locked, clicks in the binder have no effect on it.

If you have split the editor so that two editors are visible on screen,
clicks in the binder will go to the unlocked editor, no matter where the
focus is. (You can turn off this behaviour via the “Behaviors” Pane of the
Preferences, under “Navigation” in the sidebar.)

Ctrl-click on the header and deselect “Lock in Place” to remove the lock.

Transcribing audio and media files in Scrivener is easy with the split
view. Try the following:

1. Split the editor vertically or horizontally.

2. Click into one of the editors.

3. In the binder, select “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” inside the “Research”

folder so that it loads in the editor. “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” is an audio
file, so you won’t see much other than the play controls when you
mouse over the editor. (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 one editor while typing in the other.

You can control the media file using the keyboard shortcuts defined in

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the Navigate > Media menu. Cmd-Return will play or pause the file, for
instance, without your having to click away from your typing.

Also note the button in the left of the media file’s footer bar:

That is the “pause and rewind” button. If you click it, it will turn blue,
indicating that it is on. When “pause and rewind” is turned on,
whenever you pause the media file it will automatically be rewound a
couple of seconds (you can determine exactly how many seconds it gets
rewound in the Behaviors pane of the Preferences, under “Playback”).
This is very useful for transcription.

Scrivener features a “Linguistic Focus” feature that allows you to fade

out other text in the editor except for certain speech types. For instance,
you can fade out everything except your adverbs, to check for overuse.

You can bring up the Linguistic Focus panel by going to Edit > Writing
Tools > Linguistic Focus… in the main menu. Then simply select a part of
speech to focus on.

This feature uses linguistic analysis tools that are built into macOS, but it
also adds something else: dialogue focus. Selecting “Direct Speech” as
the focus will fade out all text except for that contained between speech
marks. If you are writing a novel or story, this is a great way of checking
the flow of a conversation you have written without being distracted by
all of the action and attributions.

Having problems coming up with character names? Scrivener comes

with a name generator, available from Edit > Writing Tools > Name

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Generator…

You can print individual documents, the contents of the outliner, and
index cards from the corkboard, by using File > Print Current Document…
in the main menu.

You can change various options pertaining to printing as follows:

1. In the main menu, go to File > Page Setup…

2. From the pop-up menu that says “Page Attributes” at the top,
select “Scrivener”.

In “The Basics”, we looked at creating snapshots and viewing them in

the inspector.

If you ever want more space to read through a snapshot, you can drag a
snapshot from the list in the inspector onto the header view of the editor
to load it there.

Try this now:

1. Split the editor.

2. Take a snapshot of this document (Cmd-5).

3. Write some text below:

⁃ Type here:

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 4. Open the inspector and switch to the snapshots pane if necessary.

5. Drag the snapshot you just took from the list in the inspector to the
header bar of the other editor. The snapshot is now displayed in
the other editor.

6. Now try dragging the snapshot from the inspector list again, but
this time hold down Option on the keyboard as you drop it onto
the header bar. The editor will now show the differences between
the snapshot and the current version of the document.

Scrivener keeps track of how many words and characters you write
every day. To see a breakdown of how many words you’ve written each
day and month for a particular project, go to Project > Writing History…

By default, when you drag items around in the binder or outliner, you
can drop them on other items as well as between them. Dropping “on”
an item places the dropped document inside the document it was
dropped on, as a subdocument.

Holding the Option key down while dragging restricts this behaviour so
that you can only drop between documents—this can be useful when you
want a little more accuracy.

Drag Text to the Binder

You can create new documents from sections of text in the editor as
follows:

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 1. Select some text in the editor.

2. Click on the text and hold to begin a drag.

3. Drag the text into the binder.

A new document will be created containing the dragged text.

Drag Text from the Binder

You can insert the text of a binder document into another binder
document like this:

1. In the editor, open the document into which you want to insert the
text.

2. In the binder, locate the document whose text you wish to insert.

3. Drag the document from the binder into the editor, holding down
the Option key on the keyboard as you drop.

The text of the document will be copied into the editor.

A quick way of adding documents to the project bookmarks list is by

dragging them from the binder and dropping them onto the red
“Bookmarks” toolbar icon.

By default, clicking on a document link opens it in the other editor;

double-clicking the icon of a bookmark from the inspector list opens it in
a Quick Reference panel.

You can change this behaviour and determine how you would like links

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and bookmarks to be opened as follows:

1. In the main menu, go to Scrivener > Preferences…

2. Click on “Behaviors” in the toolbar.

3. Select “Document Links” in the sidebar.

You will be presented with a number of options that allow you to

customise how document links and bookmarks are opened.

When assigning keywords to documents from the keywords panel, you

can simultaneously assign the groups to which they belong by holding
down the Option key while dragging. Try this:

1. Open the inspector and select the Metadata tab, ensuring the
Keywords pane is visible.

2. Open the keywords panel (Project > Show Project Keywords).

3. Click on the triangle next to “Characters” in the panel to reveal the

names of some characters.

4. If you were to drag one of these character keywords to the

inspector keywords list, only the dragged keyword would be
assigned. However, try holding down the Option key whilst
dragging “John” to the inspector. Note how not only the keyword
“John” gets added, but also the name of its group, “Characters”.

The index card in the inspector can be used to show an image instead of
a synopsis. If an image is used instead of a synopsis, then the image will
also be used on the corkboard. This could be useful if you have a

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document about a character and want a photo to represent the character
on the corkboard, for instance.

To use an image in the index card for a document:

1. Open the Inspector.

2. Select the notes pane so that the synopsis and notes are displayed.

3. In the synopsis header bar, click on the icon of the picture. The
synopsis area will be replaced with a grey area saying “Drop an
image here.”

4. Locate the image you wish to use in the Finder and drag it into the
grey area.

To switch back to the synopsis, click on the index card icon in the
synopsis header bar (this will not remove the image, but just toggle back
to displaying the synopsis).

Generally, Scrivener is set up to assume that each project contains a

single book (or writing project): when you compile, you compile the
entire Draft folder into a single manuscript. However, you don’t have to
work this way. Perhaps you are working on a series of books that rely on
the same research, for instance—in that case, you might want to set up a
project to contain multiple books. Here’s how:

1. Inside the Draft folder, setup a subfolder for each book.

2. Treat each subfolder inside the Draft folder as though it were the
Draft folder for one of your books, creating your chapters for each
book inside the book subfolder.

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 3. Adjust the section type settings under “Default Types by
Structure” in Project Settings as necessary, so that they correctly
reflect the updated structure.

Then, when you want to compile one of the books:

1. Go to File > Compile…

2. Above the list of documents on the right side of the Compile

panel, click on the pop-up menu next to where it says
“Compile” (this pop-up normally shows the name of your Draft
folder).

3. Select the folder containing the book you wish to compile.

4. Tick “Treat compile group as complete manuscript”. This tells

Scrivener that the folder you are compiling should be treated as
though it is a complete book and not part of a larger draft.

5. Ensure “Include text of containing group” is not ticked.

Some project templates use information from Contacts to populate title

pages with your name and address. By default, it takes this information
from “My Card” in Contacts. If you would like Scrivener to use a
different Contacts card, simply type “(Scrivener:UseMe)” (with no
spaces and including the parentheses) somewhere in the “note” area of
the entry in Contacts you wish to use.

Even easier: Go to Scrivener > Preferences and enter your details in the
“Author Information” section of the “General” pane.

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If you find yourself opening and closing the binder and inspector
frequently, or spending a lot of time setting up the corkboard or outliner
view to appear in the right place for a particular task, check out the
Layouts feature:

From the main menu, select Window > Layouts > Manage Layouts…

This allows you to save the state of the interface and quickly return to it
at a later time, either via the layouts panel or the Window > Layouts menu.

Layouts can also be accessed through the View button which appears on
the very left of the toolbar by default. Several useful built-in Layouts are
provided for you.

If you have to gather a lot of research in other applications and find

yourself doing a lot of copying and pasting into Scrivener, the Scratch
Pad and clippings features may come in handy.

Scratch Pad
The scratch pad is a panel that can be called up from any other
application using a keyboard shortcut that you set in the “General” pane
of the Preferences (the default shortcut is Shift-Cmd-Return). You can
paste or type notes into it and send them to one of your open projects
either straight away or at some point later (scratch pad notes are saved
in a folder on your hard drive that you can specify in the preferences—
they are not part of any project).

Clippings Services
Scrivener also makes some clipping features available via the global

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macOS Services menu. To enable them:

1. Open System Preferences.

2. Open the “Keyboard” pane of System Preferences.

3. Select the “Shortcuts” tab at the top.

4. Select “Services” in the sidebar.

5. Scroll down to the “Scrivener” services in the list and tick any that
you wish to enable.

Although Scrivener is designed to be as stable as possible, and its auto-

save should ensure your work is constantly saved, with important
writing projects it’s always a good idea to make regular backups, saved
to either cloud services or external hard drives, so that your work is
always safe no matter what happens.

Automatic Backups
By default, Scrivener will back up a project every time it is closed, and
up to a maximum of five backups of each project will be kept around
(with newer backups replacing older ones). You can change this
behaviour and also choose the folder in which automatic backups are
stored, as follows:

1. From the main menu, choose Scrivener > Preferences…

2. Click on the “Backup” toolbar icon in the Preferences panel that

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 appears.

You will be presented with a number of options that allow you to

determine when and how backups are made.
Click the “Choose…” button next to “Backup location” to change the
automatic backups folder, and click the “Open backup folder…” button
to open the folder currently used for backups in the Finder.

Manual Backups
There are two ways of manually creating a backup of a project:

1. Go to File > Backup > Back Up Now. This will create a new backup of
the project in the automatic backups folder (as determined by the
Preferences).

2. Go to File > Back Up > Back Up To… You will be presented with a
chooser panel, allowing you to choose where the backup should be
saved.

If at any time you decide you want to wipe all of your edits and restore
the tutorial to its original state, follow these steps:

1. Ctrl-click or right-click on the project title right at the very top of

the tutorial project window. A menu will appear showing the path
to the project.

2. Click on the second item in the menu, which will be the folder in
which the tutorial project is stored. This will open a Finder

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 window.

3. Close the tutorial project in Scrivener.

4. In the Finder window that opened in (2), move the tutorial project
to the Trash in your Dock.

5. Back in Scrivener, go to Help > Interactive Tutorial… You will be

prompted to create a fresh tutorial project.

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