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Just a quick note before we begin: this tutorial assumes that you are using

the default options. If necessary, you can reset them to the defaults by clicking
on the “Defaults” bu on in the Options pane, available under Tools >
Options…. If you haven’t made any changes to the options, you don’t need to
worry about this. Right, on with the tutorial.
When you first open a Scrivener project, by default you are presented with
two panes:

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

2. T HE E DITOR
Next to the binder you have the main editor, which displays the current
document. The main editor is what you are looking at right now as you read this
text document. There are several ways to load a document in the editor, but the
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text document. There are several ways to load a document in the editor, but the
one you will use most often is simply selecting a file in the binder, as you did to
load this one. Scrivener allows you to create or import any number of text
documents. You can also import image, web, movies and PDF documents. To
import documents, use File > Import > Files… or simply drag the files you wish
to import from Windows Explorer into the binder of your Scrivener project.
You can change the current document by clicking on another item in the
binder. Try that now—double-click a word in this sentence to select it (you’ll see
why in a moment), then click on “Alhambra” inside the “Research” folder (you
may need to expand the Research folder by clicking on the triangle or [+] sign in
Windows XP next to it, first) and then return here (“Step 1: Beginnings”). See
how the selection that you created before is saved and scrolled to automatically?
Scrivener always remembers your cursor position and selection, even between
sessions. Use this way of “bookmarking your spot” to your advantage as you
progress through the tutorial.

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

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

You have just switched between documents. You might use different
documents for different chapters, different scenes, different ideas, articles,
characters, whatever you want. There are other ways of switching between
documents, too. Another one you will use frequently is the header view. See that
bar at the top of the text, the one that has the arrows on the left of it and says
“Step 2: Header View” in it? Well, that is the header view (which is sometimes
also referred to as the “header bar”). You can rename the document by clicking
into the title of the header view, and there are several options available in a
menu if you click on the icon next to the title.
The arrows on the left of the header view that point left and right are the
history navigation bu ons and work much like web browser navigation arrows
—they allow you to step back and forth through the documents you have had
open in the editor. The white up and down arrows on the right of the header bar
step through the contents of the binder sequentially. To see the difference, try
the following:

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1. Click on the “Alhambra” image document in the Research folder again
and then click on the left arrow in the header view. You will be returned
to this document, because this was the one you had open last.
2. Click on the right arrow and you will be returned to the “Alhambra”
image document again. (Make sure you come back here afterwards
though!)
3. Now, with this document open, click on the down arrow on the right and
then click on the up arrow again to return here. Note how the down arrow
takes you to the next document in the binder, whereas the right arrow
takes you to the next document in the navigation history. If you prefer the
keyboard, you can use Alt-Shift-LeftArrow and RightArrow to do the
same.
4. If you click on the li le icon next to the title of this document in the header
bar, you’ll find some handy commands you can use. One of these is a “Go
To” menu. This arranges the contents of your binder into a series of sub-
menus. You can thus easily jump anywhere in the Binder, even if it is
hidden.
While we’re here, note that the selection highlight in the binder does not
necessarily follow what is being displayed in the main editor—if you change the
contents of the editor using the history bu ons, for instance, the selection in the
binder will not change. You can thus navigate around using the header view
without losing track of the original document on which you were working in the
binder.
Try using the “Go To” menu in the header bar icon menu to find and
navigate to “Step 3: Footer View”. You’ll need to first select the Draft sub-menu,
and then “Part 1: Basics”…

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

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

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

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

CLICK INTO THIS TEXT.

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

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

All good so far, I hope. Now let’s familiarise ourselves with some other
basic features. Click on “Step 4: Full Screen” in the binder.
Full screen is a very nice feature for blocking everything else out while you
write. I’m not going to pretend it’s innovative or anything—I think Blue-Tec
(now called The Soulmen), the creators of Ulysses, were the first to implement
something like this for a text editor—but it is very handy. Either hit F11 or click
on “Full Screen” in the toolbar above – do it now!

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

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

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

You can leave full screen mode now by hi ing the Escape key on your
keyboard.
Now that you are back in the main interface, notice the icon on this
particular step. It looks like a stack of paper because it is not only a text file
(which you are reading), but a “container” as well—it has subdocuments within
it as though it were a folder. You aren’t limited to just pu ing items into folders;
in fact, anything in Scrivener can have subdocuments, even movies and PDF
documents.
We’ve now covered the basics of navigating between documents and using
full screen mode for distraction-free writing. Now it’s time to meet the
Inspector. Click on “Inspector” in the toolbar (the blue disk on the right, with
the “i” inside it; or press Ctrl-Shift-I). A third pane will appear on the right of
this view.

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You may find this text a li le scrunched up now. If so, click on the
“Maximize” bu on at the very top-right of the window (the middle icon that
appears in most windows on your computer).
Right, let’s look at the inspector. At the bo om of the inspector, in the footer
bar, you will see these bu ons:

The padlock bu on on the far right allows you to “lock” the inspector to a
particular editor when the editor is split—we won’t worry about that for now,
though, as we haven’t looked at spli ing the editor yet. The other bu ons allow
you to choose what to view in the inspector. The number of bu ons that appear
will depend on what you are viewing in the current editor (the second to last
bu on, “Snapshots”, is only available for text documents, for instance). An
asterisk next to one of the icons tells you that there is content in that part of the
inspector. In the screenshot above, the document has a snapshot (an older
version of it has been saved to memory for safe keeping). This document you are
reading has a “Reference”, which we will soon cover.
To begin with, make sure the leftmost bu on, “Notes”, is selected, and then
click on the next document in the binder, “5a: The Synopsis Index Card”.

The first thing you will notice is the index card at the top. This appears in
the Notes, References and Kere

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

Please click on “5b: Meta-Data”.

G ENERAL M ETA -D ATA


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

Next, let’s look at the “Notes” pane.


At the bo om of the inspector is the notes area, where you can jot down
anything you want that will help you with your document. If you click in the
notes header bar (where it says “Document Notes”), you can flip between
Document Notes and Project Notes. As you would imagine, document notes
are specific to each document and will change depending on the document you
are viewing in the current editor, whereas project notes can be viewed from any
document (project notes can also be seen in the inspector when you select one of
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document (project notes can also be seen in the inspector when you select one of
the special root folders—Draft, Research and Trash—which have no associated
meta-data or synopses).
Please click on “5d: References” in the binder.

Click on the next bu on in the inspector footer bar, the one with the picture
of several book spines on it. This switches to the “References” pane (the index
card and meta-data area will remain where they are, only the notes will
disappear to be replaced by a list of references). The references pane allows you
to store references to other documents within the project, on your hard-disk or
on the Internet.

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

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View > Layout > No Split menu command. Make sure the blue header bar is on
this document when you do so, otherwise you’ll end up in Step 6 from the other
split!

Next click on the key bu on at the bo om of the inspector to view the


keywords pane and then move on to “5e: Keywords”.
As well as Label and Status, you can also assign keywords to your
documents. Keywords are useful for adding arbitrary tags to documents that
you can use when searching. So, for instance, you could add keywords for
characters that occur in a scene, the location a scene takes place, the theme,
authors referenced, or anything else (or you can just ignore keywords
completely). You can add keywords by clicking on the “+” bu on. You can also
assign keywords via the Project Keywords dialogue. Open that now by clicking
on the “Keywords” bu on in the toolbar (the black box with the key inside it) or
Ctrl-Shift-O.

A floating window (that means you can keep it open while you work, and it
will always “float” on top of the other windows) will appear. This shows all of
the keywords that you have created or assigned to documents so far. You can
also create keywords inside this window and drag them to the keywords table in
the Inspector. You can change the colour associated with a keyword by double-
clicking on the colour chip in the Project Keywords window. (Another way of
assigning keywords is by dragging them onto documents in the binder or the
outliner and corkboard views that we will look at later. You can assign
keywords to multiple documents at once by selecting the documents in the
binder and then dragging the keywords from the Keywords dialogue onto the
selection).
Try dragging the keyword entitled “Assign this one” to the keywords table.
You can assign multiple keywords at once. To see this in action, click on the
triangle next to “Characters” in the floating Keywords dialogue to reveal the
names of some characters. Hold down the “Ctrl” key to select multiple

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names of some characters. Hold down the “Ctrl” key to select multiple
keywords, then drag all of the selected keywords into the inspector keyword
table. Note how all the selected keywords are added.
A quick way of searching for documents that have been assigned particular
keywords is to select the keywords you want to search for in the Project
Keywords dialogue and then click on the “Search” bu on at the bo om. Try
that now, with the “Themes” keyword. The binder list to the left will be
replaced by a search result list. Only this one document should be listed. To
leave the search result list, click the “X” bu on in the lower right-hand corner of
the binder sidebar. We’ll learn more about searching later.

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

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

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

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

This sentence has a comment a ached.


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

This sentence has a footnote a ached.1


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

A DDING C OMMENTS AND F OOTNOTES


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

Select some of the text in this sentence.


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

This sentence will be commented.


Again, create a comment using your preferred method. Note how the
whole word “commented” gets a comment associated with it.
Let’s try it with a footnote too. This time, place the cursor right at the end of
this sentence, after the full stop, then click and drag to select the word “printed”:

This sentence will have a footnote after it when exported or


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

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

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

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

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

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Welcome to Part 2 of the tutorial—you can close “Part 1” by clicking on the
triangle next to where it says “Part 1” in the binder on the left. You can also hide
the Inspector by clicking on the blue disk icon in the toolbar again.
By now you have learnt some of the fundamental features of Scrivener.
Now it’s time to move on to some of the organisational features. Firstly, notice
that this document is actually a folder in the binder, which is why you initially
saw a corkboard when you clicked on it. There is no real difference between text
and folder documents aside from their icons and what happens when you click
on them in the Binder. Note that the folder icon for this document (“Part 2:
Organisation”) has a li le page icon in its corner. This means that this folder
contains text—the text you are reading now. It does not have anything to do
with the fact that it also has text documents inside it (such as “Step 7” and so
on). The other major difference between folders and text documents is the
default way they get viewed when you click on them. You’ve already seen a
small demonstration of that, but we’ll explore that in greater detail in the next
step.
In fact, you can convert a folder document into a text document and vice
versa very easily. Click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder to make sure it is
selected, and then go to Documents > Convert > Convert To File in the main
menu. The folder icon changes into a text stack (the stack indicates that the text
document has subdocuments). If you go back to the Documents > Convert
menu, you will see that now you have the option of converting it back to a folder
—do that now. The idea behind this flexibility is that you can choose to have
different visual indicators for different levels of organisation, and also you don’t
have to plan in advance how you structure your project, because if you end up
using a text document as a container for other files, you can always convert it to
a folder later, and vice versa.
To create new documents, click “Add” in the toolbar.

If you click on the downward arrow next to the “Add” bu on, a menu
appears that lets you choose which kind of document you would like to add.

17
appears that lets you choose which kind of document you would like to add.
You can also add documents via the Project menu, binder sidebar footer and
contextual menus. Hi ing enter in the binder, outliner or corkboard will also
create a new file.

A Brief Word on Terminology:


You’ve seen a few terms thrown around at this point. The documentation,
application and this tutorial refer to the items in your binder depending upon
their type if necessary. In fact there was one right there. We use the term
document or item when the specific type is not important. A document can be a
folder, a text item, or even a PDF; hence the Document menu. Text items can be
referred to as text or files interchangeably. When files have other files within
them, we call that a file stack or a file group.

Okay, move on to Step 7 when you’re ready (you will need to expand “Part
2” by clicking on the disclosure arrow next to it). Or go get a cup of tea and a
biscuit.

Scrivener’s editor has four modes—four different ways of viewing your


work—and learning how and when to switch between them will make your
Scrivener experience much more comfortable. The four modes are as follows:

1. Single Document Mode


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

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

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

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

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

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

4. “Scrivenings” Mode
“Scrivenings” is the term for Scrivener’s combined text mode, and it is one
of Scrivener’s coolest features. It allows you to view or edit multiple text
19
In this case, the left-most icon is a single sheet of text. You click on the mode you
want to view—single document mode, corkboard mode, or outliner mode.
When you are viewing a folder or a document that has subdocuments,
though, there are four ways of viewing the editor available—the single document
(disregarding the content of any children items), corkboard and outliner mode,
and also Scrivenings mode. You can return to single document mode by de-
selecting all of the segments of the Group Mode control—that is, click on the one
that is selected to de-select it—just as you did at the end of Step 6 to view the
text of the “Part 2” folder.
You can also switch between view modes using the top three items in the
View menu, or using the Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+3 keyboard shortcuts.

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

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

Suddenly, this document is displayed in two panes, which is great when


you need to refer back to an earlier place in the file, but don’t want to lose the
ability to keep typing in the current location. Note that through the Layout

21
ability to keep typing in the current location. Note that through the Layout
menu, you can also choose a Vertical Split, No Split to get rid of the split
altogether, or to hide the header and footer views for the current document
view.
All well and good, but we don’t want to be limited to viewing only one
document at a time, do we? We can do that in any word processor worth its salt
(whatever that means), after all. And naturally, we’re not. Click on any
document in the binder, and it will be shown in the editor that currently has the
focus. You can tell which editor currently has the focus because when there is a
split, the header bar of the focused editor turns blue.
In the binder, click “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” from inside the “Research” folder.
“ThisIsBuzzAldrin” is an audio file, so you won’t see much other than a media
control bar in the lower part of the top pane (actually, that audio file is the
beginning of the coolest phone message I ever picked up; sadly, the message
was not for me).
Now you can play the audio file in the top pane whilst typing in this
bo om pane. You can control the media file using the keyboard shortcuts
defined in the View > Media menu. Ctrl+Enter will play or pause the file, for
instance—without you having to click outside of this text. These shortcuts are
very useful for transcription work, or for referring to a video file while writing.
But of course, you can use the split view to view any two documents in
Scrivener alongside one another. The snazziness of this feature should
immediately be apparent: you can refer to another text, PDF, image or video
document in one view while typing in another. You could hide the toolbar, the
header and footer views and the binder and just have the two documents side-
by-side while you work.

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

The corkboard is one of Scrivener’s most distinctive structural tools, so let’s


look at that now.

Basic Usage
The corkboard shows the immediate subdocuments of the selected
document. To see what I mean, click into the top editor to give it the focus (it
should still be showing the “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” media file; if so, click anywhere
22
should still be showing the “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” media file; if so, click anywhere
in the grey area—so that the header bar of the top editor turns blue. Once the
top editor has the focus, click on the “Draft” folder in the binder, and ensure that
the capsule “Group Mode” control in the toolbar has the corkboard selected.
Note how the corkboard in the top editor now shows the folders, “Part 1”
through to “Part 5”, represented as index cards. If you look in the binder, you
will notice that these five folders are the immediate subdocuments (or
“children”) of the Draft folder—that is, they are only indented one level from the
Draft folder. The corkboard thus allows you to concentrate on individual levels
of your structure.
Next, in the corkboard itself, double-click on the folder icon in the top-left
of the second card, which is titled “Part 2: Organisation”. This will drill down to
show the contents of the “Part 2” folder represented as index cards. Each card
shows the title of the document and a synopsis area that can be used to remind
you of the content of the document or to note what you intend to write in the
document later. You can edit the synopsis or title by double-clicking into a card,
and you can drag the cards around (and into the binder) to reorder your
documents.
If the inspector is open while the corkboard (or outliner) is open, it will
show information for the currently selected card.
You can change the corkboard se ings—the number of cards that get
drawn across, their width and so on—by clicking on the bu on with the image
of four index cards in it in the right of the footer bar beneath the corkboard:

23
(Incidentally, if you don’t like the corkboard background, you can change it
to a colour or texture of your choice in the Corkboard tab of the Tools >
Options. You can also change the way the cards look, to get rid of the rounded
corners to make them look more like real index cards, or switch to virtual pins
instead of corner markers for labels, which we will turn on shortly.)

Controlling The Other Editor From The Corkboard


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

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

View Options
Go to View > Corkboard Options > Show Pins. The result will depend on
the look you have chosen for the label indicator in the corkboard Options. If you
are using the default corner mark look, then each card that has a label associated
with it will now have a colour chip in its top-right corner; if you are using the
pin look, then each index card will now display a pin holding it in place that is
the colour of the label associated with the document. Alternatively, you can
select View > Use Label Color In > Index Cards to tint the actual cards with the
colour of the label. You can also select Show Stamps via View > Corkboard

24
colour of the label. You can also select Show Stamps via View > Corkboard
Options, which places a diagonal stamp on the cards—this stamp shows the
status associated with the document represented by the index card.
Right-clicking on an index card brings up a contextual menu that allows
you to change the label (and thus the colour of the pin) and status—you can use
the contextual menu to assign a label or status to multiple cards, too, by selecting
all the cards you wish to affect before Control-clicking on one of them.
There are other viewing options available in the View > Corkboard
Options menu, but we won’t cover them here (though they are all explained in
the Help file, of course).
One more thing to note, before we move on, is that graphics files get
displayed on the corkboard as pictures. Click in the corkboard above to ensure it
has the focus, and then click on the “Research” folder to see what I mean.
Okay, we covered a lot there! Remember that you don’t have to use the
features that don’t appeal to you. Not all writers like corkboards—some
Scrivener users never touch the corkboard at all, preferring the outliner, which
we’ll come to next.

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

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

25
The upper view will now have turned into an outliner, showing all of the
items contained inside the Draft (because that is what we selected in the binder).
Click on a disclosure triangle next to one of the folders to reveal the next level of
subdocuments (or Alt-click on a disclosure triangle to open all subfolders inside
the folder too, all the way down to the bo om of the hierarchy).
Next, with the outliner still focused, click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the
binder. The outliner will now show only the subdocuments of the “Part 2”
folder.
Choose which columns appear by clicking on the bu on in the top-right of
the outliner title bar, or via the View > Outliner Columns menu.

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

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

26
Once you’ve done that, go to Step 11.

27
The Inspector displays information about the chunk of text you are
currently editing, so if you lose your place you can always open that and check
the index card to see where you are.
An important point to note about Scrivenings is that you cannot make
textual edits across the individual document boundaries, so if you try to select a
range of text that spans more than one document block and try to edit it, you
will not be able to. However within each section, every edit you make will be
automatically saved into the original document.
Now it’s time to click on “Step 12”...

At the risk of telling you the blindingly obvious, project search allows you to
search for documents inside your project that contain a particular word, phrase,
label, keyword and suchlike. Just click in the search field on the right-hand side
of the toolbar and type the phrase you want to search for.
Project Search Tip
When clicked on, the downwards-pointing triangle next to the
magnifying glass in the search field brings up a menu that allows you to
modify the search options. When the search field is left blank, a
summary of the more important options will be provided for your
convenience. Notice that right now it says “Keywords (Exact Phrase)”.
That's because we were testing the search function with project
keywords a li le earlier.

Go ahead and change that to "All", using the magnifying glass menu. Now
click in the search field now and type “collection”.
Note how the binder is replaced by a darker coloured “Search Results” list.
This is a list of documents that contain the word “collection” somewhere within
them. Also note that the search term—in this case “collection”—is now
highlighted in yellow in the current document wherever it appears. You can
click on the documents in the search results list too, and easily see at a glance
where the term you searched for is in the document. For longer documents, just
click into them in the editor and go to Edit > Find > Find… (or hit Ctrl-F) to
bring up the Find panel, which can be used to search within the documents
themselves. To get rid of the search results list, you can click on the “close”
bu on on the right of the search field:
28
Or on the bu on in the footer bar of the sidebar:

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

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

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

Creating an Arbitrary Collection


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

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

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

The binder will temporarily disappear, to be replaced by a flat list showing


only the documents you selected. You haven’t moved those documents, though

30
only the documents you selected. You haven’t moved those documents, though
—they are all still in their rightful places in the binder. You’ve just created a
collection (more specifically, an arbitrary collection) and when you created it, the
selected documents were automatically added to it. To see what I mean right-
click on one of the documents in the collection list and select “Reveal in Binder”
from the View menu. This will show you where the document is located in the
binder. Click back on the collection tab once you’ve tried this, to return to the
collection.
You can rename the collection to anything you want, and you can change
its colour by double-clicking on its colour chip:

Go ahead and try changing the title and colour. You can also drag and drop
tabs amongst one another to change their order.
Let’s add some more documents to the collection. Click back on the Binder
tab and select some different documents. Once you’ve selected some, drag and
drop them onto your collection tab. You will see that the documents you
dragged onto the tab are now in the collection too.
You can drag and drop the documents in the collection list to arrange them
into any order you want. If we unlocked this editor, clicking on documents in
the collection would open them in the editor, just as happens when selecting
documents in the binder. To remove items from the list, simply select them and
31
documents in the binder. To remove items from the list, simply select them and
press Shift-Del. Note that this will not delete the original item, it will merely
remove it from this list.
Collections can be used for whatever you like. You might, for instance, use
them to gather together documents you need to do more work on, removing
them as you are satisfied with them. You might use a collection to experiment
with the order of documents before commi ing to the arrangement. Once you
were happy with the arrangement, you could select all the documents, right-
click on them, and use Move To from the contextual menu to move them all to
the location in the binder you want them.

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

To delete a collection of any kind, just select its tab and then click on the “-”
bu on in the “Collections” bar. Deleting a collection has no effect on its
constituent documents—they are not deleted and remain in their place in the
binder.
There’s lots you can do with collections—or you don’t have to use them at
all. Like most things in Scrivener, they are available if you need them but can be
ignored if you don’t.
Let’s unlock the editor now. Click on the icon in the header view again and
this time de-select “Lock in Place”. You can also click on the “Collections” icon
in the toolbar to hide the collections pane if you want.
Now it’s on to “Part 3”. Expand the “Part 3” folder if it is collapsed, and
then click straight on “Step 14: Importing”.
If you decide Scrivener is the program for you, the first thing you are going
to want to do is import your existing work. This is simple. Just go to File >
Import > Files…, select the files you wish to import, and click the “Import”
bu on. If you wish to import including subdirectories, maintaining the filing
structure from Explorer in the binder, then drag & drop the folder into the
Binder, instead. You can also drag files from Scrivener’s binder out again to
export.
Files Won’t Import?
Note that if you have selected a document that is contained inside the
“Draft” folder in the binder, when you go to File > Import > Files…
you will only have the option of importing text file types; this is because
33
you will only have the option of importing text file types; this is because
files are imported at the location of the selection in the binder and the
“Draft” folder only supports text files. Thus, if you wish to import
media files, make sure that the selection is not in the “Draft” folder.

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

▪ RTF
▪ DOC
▪ DOCX
▪ TXT / plain text
▪ PDF
▪ Final Draft FDX
▪ HTML
▪ HTM
▪ Most image files
▪ Windows media files (.wmv, .wav, .mp3 and .wma)
(Note that you can also copy and paste content into Scrivener from any
source. If rich text forma ing is not critical it is recommended that you copy and
paste using Edit > Paste and Match Style (or Ctrl-Shift-V ). This method will
ensure that text pasted from other applications is cleaned and usable within
Scrivener, in much the same way that pasting text into Notepad and then back
out again would “clean” it of all forma ing.)
It is important to note that some a ributes may be lost for certain document
types upon import.
You can also import web pages directly from the Internet by using File >
Import > Web Page….
You can actually import any file at all—it doesn’t have to be one of the
supported formats listed above. If you import an unsupported file type, it will
appear in the editor as a link. Double-clicking on the link will open the file in the
program associated with it on your machine.
On to Step 15...

What if you want to use Scrivener but are worried about being locked in?
The Scrivener project folder format (the project is the entire contents of the

34
The Scrivener project folder format (the project is the entire contents of the
folder ending in “.scriv”) is unique, so what happens if you want to move your
work elsewhere? Fear not: you are not locked in at all. Simply select all of the
files you want to export in the binder (everything if you so wish) and then go to
File > Export > Files… Enter the name of the directory that will be created to
hold all of the files, choose your preferred text file format and whether you want
to include notes and meta-data in the export (which will include the synopses),
then hit “Export”. All the selected files will be exported with the binder
structure intact; that is, the virtual folders in the binder will become actual
folders in the Windows Explorer. You can even drag the selected documents
from the binder onto your desktop or Windows Explorer. All files in the Draft
folder will be exported as RTF and all the other files will simply be copied in
their native format.
That’s how you can get anything out of Scrivener. Generally, however, the
files you have inside a Scrivener project are there to support your writing—the
text you have been slaving over—writing, editing, cu ing up, rearranging—in
the Draft folder. The whole point of Scrivener is to produce that text, so at some
point you are going to want to export or print it as a single document or
manuscript.
To find out how, go to Step 16.
Scrivener’s purpose is to provide a sort of writer’s studio; a place where you
throw everything, all of your research, ideas and scribblings, with the aim of
mashing it together into a draft which you can then either print for posting off to
a publisher, or export, whether to another program for tweaking or to an e-book
format for self-publishing. This is where Scrivener’s Compile feature comes in.
The Compile feature takes everything that is in the Draft folder and
generates a single, forma ed document from it. You have complete control over
the output—you can choose from various file formats (or print directly from
Scrivener), you can choose whether to include document titles (or synopses and
notes for that ma er), set up a header and footer, and even completely change
the font and paragraph forma ing if you so desire—so there’s no need to write
in the same font you use for printing and exporting unless you want to.
“Compile…” can be found at the bo om of the File menu. Try selecting it
now, but then click “Cancel” and come back here.
At first glance, it probably doesn’t look like much. This is because it is set

35
At first glance, it probably doesn’t look like much. This is because it is set
up by default to show only the most basic options—you can choose a preset
from the “Format As” pop-up bu on and a file format from the “Compile For”
bu on, then click on “Compile” to create a basic document containing the
merged contents of your Draft folder.
Saving Your Settings Without Compiling
As you proceed through these instructions, you may find that you need
to return to the editor to scroll the window or refresh your memory.
While the Compile window is open, you cannot make changes to your
project, so you will be locked out of the window. To return without
losing the se ings you’ve changed so far, use the “Save & Close” bu on
at the bo om of the Compile window.

Let’s try that now—we’ll generate a PDF preview of the draft of this
tutorial project:
1. Go to File > Compile…
2. Ensure that “Custom” is chosen next to “Format As” (Custom
represents the se ings that have been saved into the project. In this case,
the tutorial has been set up to compile a document that looks as it does in
the editor).
3. Ensure “PDF (.pdf)” is selected next to “Compile For”.
4. Click on “Compile”.
5. Enter a destination and file name for the PDF and click Save.
6. Open the PDF produced by Scrivener.
You can choose from one of the other “Format As” presets to format your
draft differently. For instance, try compiling again, just as you did above, but
this time choose “Novel Standard Manuscript” format (be sure you choose
“PDF (.pdf)” from the “Compile For” list again, as changing the “Format As”
option can affect the selected file format). This time, you will find that the draft
has been compiled using a Courier 12-point font with double line-spacing, with
chapter titles inserted from the folder names, and each text file separated with a
hash-mark (”#”).
Format Setting Tips
Most of the presets in the “Format As” menu will apply different
forma ing to your manuscript—different fonts, different page se ings,
titles, separators and so on. If you find yourself ge ing frustrated when
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titles, separators and so on. If you find yourself ge ing frustrated when
trying to tweak the Compile se ings, or if you want to start from
scratch, it is often a good idea to select “Original” and start from there.
“Original” is set up so as not to override any of the forma ing—the
exported or printed manuscript will look just like the text in the main
editor. You can then work through the Compile options, se ing them
up as required.

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

The Compile dialogue will expand to show a whole raft of options. You
don’t really need to worry too much about all of these se ings at the moment—
the main thing to know is just that this is where you come to export or print your
entire manuscript, and that the Compile se ings provide complete control over
how your manuscript will be forma ed should you need it.
Let’s try a quick custom compile though. This time, with the compile
dialogue expanded to show all of the advanced options, try the following:
1. Choose “Original” from the “Format As” list again, to reset the compiler
to use basic se ings.
2. Take a look at the “Contents” pane. This allows you to choose which
documents get compiled. The pop-up bu on at the top, which currently
says “Draft”, can be used to choose only a subfolder of the Draft (so that
you could compile and print only a single chapter, for instance) or to
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2.

you could compile and print only a single chapter, for instance) or to
choose one of the collections we created in Part 2 (so you can compile
only the documents that appear in a particular collection). You can
uncheck the “Include” bu on for any document you don’t want included
in your compiled document, and there are some filter options at the
bo om of this pane, too. You can thus fine-tune which documents go into
your final manuscript. All we’re going to do is click on the pop-up bu on
at the top that currently says “Draft”, and choose “Part 1: Basics”—that
is, we are only going to compile the “Part 1” folder.

3. Click on “Forma ing”. This is the part of the Compile sheet that allows
you to choose how your text looks—what font it uses and suchlike. At the
top is a list with a folder, text group and text document in it, each saying
“Level 1+” next to them (text groups are just text documents that have
other text documents grouped inside them—have a look at “Step 5: The
Inspector” to see an example of one). Each document type can be
forma ed separately.
4. At the top of this pane you will see a bu on entitled “Override text and
notes forma ing”. It is unchecked at the moment, which means that the
text (and notes should you choose to include them) of each document will
appear in your compiled manuscript exactly as they do in the editor, just
as they did the first time you compiled. We’re going to override the
forma ing, though, so click on this bu on to tick it.

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7. Above the forma ing bar, click on the “Page padding” stepper control to
change the page padding to “8 lines”. This will add eight lines of blank
space before the documents of the folder type whenever they start on a
new page. (You’ll see what I mean in a minute.) Click “OK” to save these
changes.
8. Next, click on the text group row (the middle one), and tick the “Title”
checkbox. Leave the “Text” checkbox ticked for this one, though. The text
area at the bo om will be updated to reflect your changes.
9. Click the “Modify” bu on and then click the title text to select it. Change
it to underlined and italicised, using the format bar, and change its colour
to blue using the colour control.
10. Click into the main text area and change the forma ing to whatever you
want—use the “A” bu on to change the font, the ruler to change the
paragraph indenting, and the line spacing control in the format bar to
change (who’d have thought it) the line spacing.
11. Click on the last row, the text icon with “Level 1+” next to it, and do the
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11. Click on the last row, the text icon with “Level 1+” next to it, and do the
same again, but this time choose a different format for the title and text.
12. Now, from the list of se ings on the left, choose “Separators”. This
section allows us to choose how our documents should get stitched
together—whether we should put page breaks between the different
components or just line breaks and so forth.
13. For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”.
14. For the “Folder and Text separator”, choose “Single return”. This will
ensure that the text of any documents following a folder will be added
straight after the folder titles which we set up in our forma ing options.
15. Right, at last, click on the “Compile For” drop down and select
“Preview”. Then click “Compile” to open a preview.
Take a look through the preview document to see what you’ve done—
you’ve added titles and completely changed the way the text looks. Once you’re
happy with that, click the preview click the “Close” bu on to return to the
Compile dialogue. We’re just going to make one tweak, as follows:

1. Choose the “Forma ing” pane again.


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

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

Now on to the fourth part…


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

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

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

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

T HE F ORMAT M ENU
The Format menu provides various ways of forma ing your text which are
standard in many applications along with some that are unique to Scrivener, the
la er of which are listed below.

H IGHLIGHT
Pre y straightforward, this one. Choose from several standard highlighter
pen colours to highlight your text.

I NLINE A NNOTATION AND F OOTNOTES


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

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

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

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

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

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This has been a fairly thorough tour of all of the main features of Scrivener.
You probably won’t use half of the features you’ve just learnt of for some time—
in fact, on a daily basis, you will probably only use the most basic features of
writing in the editor, creating new documents, and moving documents aroundthets, aati

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heartfelt thanks to you for choosing Scrivener (or considering it) as the tool for
your own writing.

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

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

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