Tech Tuesday – Page 3 – Gwen Hernandez

Tech Tuesday: Linking documents in Scrivener

April 20, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life46 Comments

Last week I looked at how Scrivener's Annotations feature allows you to mark up your documents with reminders for further research or revision notes.

But maybe you want to write a pretty lengthy note on a new direction for the scene, or you want to link to another scene within your project. Or you have the research article imported into your project already, but you don't want to stop and go through it right now.

For cases like those above, Scrivener offers the ability to insert links to other documents within your project. You can link to text documents (scenes, character notes, story outline), or to files, photos, and web pages already imported into your project. You can even create a link and a new document at the same time.

Ready?

How to insert a link to an existing file within your Scrivener project:

1. Select the word or text you'd like to use for the hyperlink (otherwise, Scrivener will insert a link with the name of the file you select).
NOTE: You can choose to insert the link in an annotation to prevent it from being embedded in the text of your MS.

2. Go to Edit–>Scrivener Link, point to the location of the file, click on the file you want to link.

What if you want to make a list or a full page of notes?

1. Follow step 1 from above.

2. Go to Edit–>Scrivener Link–>New Link.
A pop-up menu appears with the Create New Linked Document tab selected.

3. Choose the location where you want to save the new file, enter a name for it in the text box, and click OK.
The new document appears in a quick-reference panel so you can add text.

4. Type in your notes, lists, ramblings, etc.

5. If you remove or delete the link, the new note will not be deleted from the Binder.

Want to insert a hyperlink to a web page that's not imported into your project?

1. Copy the URL of the web page.

2. Select the word or text you'd like to use for the hyperlink.

3. Go to Edit–>Add Link.

4. Make sure the Web option is selected, and then enter the URL of the web page in the text box and click OK.
NOTE: If you copied the address from your web browser, it probably already has the http:// in it, so choose the No Prefix option.

Use your link:

1. Click on the hyperlink to switch to the linked document.

2. Use the back arrow to go back to the original document.

Edit a link:

1. Select the text of the link.

2. Go to Edit–>Edit Link (Mac) or Edit–>Link (Windows).

Remove a link:

1. Select the text of the link.

2. Go to Edit–>Unlink. Or, just right click the link and choose Remove Link (Mac) or Unlink (Windows).

Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.

Happy linking!

[Updated 5/22/13]

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Tech Tuesday: Annotations in Scrivener

April 13, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life38 Comments

Do you ever wish you could scribble on your manuscript? Maybe you want to make notes about a particular paragraph you're struggling with, or mark a place that requires further research.

You guessed it. Scrivener has a function for that. It's called Annotations.

Add an Annotation

To activate the Annotation feature:

Choose Format—>Inline Annotation.
Type in your note or reminder. Make sure to set your spacing as if the annotation wasn't there, otherwise it'll be off when you print/export your manuscript.
Click outside of annotation, or go to Format—>Inline Annotation to turn it off (or, even easier, use Shift+Cmd+A for Mac, Ctrl+Shift+A for Windows).

Change the Color

If the glaring red color is too distracting, you can change it.

Mac

All future annotations will be in the new color, but previously created annotations are not affected.

Select the annotation text.
From the Format bar, choose the desired text color (or go to Format—>Font—>Show Colors and select a color).

Windows

All current and future annotations will have the new color.

Go to Tools—>Options—>Appearance.
In the Colors section, click the expansion arrow next to Editor (or double-click Editor) and select Annotation Text in the list.
Click the color box to the right and select the desired annotation color.
Click OK to apply your changes and close the Options window.

Find Your Annotations

Here's the most important part of all. After you've gone through your manuscript and you want to find the notes you made to yourself, there's an easy search.

Go to Edit—>Find—>Find by Formatting.
When the box opens, choose Inline Annotations.
To search for the next one, click Next.

If you code your Annotations (for revisions, research, etc.), you can search for only those annotations relating to what you're ready to work on. How cool is that?

In the Containing Text: box, enter the search string you want to look for.
Click Next. Scrivener will return the next annotation that meets your search criteria.

Dealing with Annotations During Compile

When you're ready to export/print your manuscript, you have a couple of options. In Compile Manuscript, under the Text Options tab, you can choose to Remove Annotations or Export Annotations as RTF.

The first option strips them out of your MS. This is where the spacing becomes important. The second option embeds the annotations in your MS (much as they look on your screen), in red and flanked by square brackets.

For all you contest judges, I could see importing the electronic entry into Scrivener, making your comments through annotations, and then exporting it with the Export Annotations as RTF feature selected. This gives you the commenting ease of Word's Track Changes function, but provides a contest-friendly RTF output.

What's your favorite way to use annotations?

Need more Scrivener help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.

Write on!

[Post updated 7/6/17]

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Tech Tuesday: Saving Compile Manuscript Settings in Scrivener

April 6, 2010Gwen HernandezTech Stuff25 Comments

Last week's Tech Tuesday post on Templates was the most popular ever. Thanks to everyone who stopped by! That's a hard act to follow, but I'll give it my best.

Did you know that in addition to saving your project settings into a template, you can also save your Compile Manuscript settings?

Here are the benefits of such a feature. Once you get everything set the way you want it, the settings will be available to all projects. In addition, you can save more than one print setup, so you could have one for e-books, one for manuscript submissions, and another for what you send to your critique partner.

Brilliant, I say.

Here's how to save your settings.

Mac

1. Go to File–>Compile.

2. Set the options for Content, Text Options, and Formatting exactly the way you want to save them. The only options that won't be saved are the document and folder selections, since these are project specific.

3. Click the Format As drop-down menu at the top of the window and choose Manage Compile Format Presets.

4. Click the [+] button at the bottom right of the window that appears.

5. Enter a name for the saved settings (e.g. Novel Export, or Notes Only), and click OK. Click OK again to return to Compile.

6. Your saved preset now appears in the Format As drop-down menu, under My Formats.

Windows

1. Go to File–>Compile.

3. Click the Save Preset button at the bottom left of the Compile window.

4. Enter a name for the saved settings (e.g. Novel Export, or Notes Only), and click OK.

5. Your saved preset now appears in the Format As drop-down menu, under My Formats.

Using Saved Settings

Now you've saved your settings into a file, but the really powerful part comes when you're ready to use them.

1. From any project, repeat step 1 above to open the Compile window. The current settings will be whatever you last used when you exported or printed, or the software default if it's a new project.
(Note: the most recent settings in Compile affect the word count in the various statistics views.)

2. Select your preset from the Format As drop-down list.

3. Make sure you've chosen the correct files and folders to include and you're ready to print or export your draft.

I hope this saves you some time in the future.

As always, I'd love to hear your ideas for a future Tech Tuesday topic.

Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.

Write on!
[Updated 5/10/13]

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Tech Tuesday: Templates in Scrivener

March 30, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life25 Comments

UPDATE: For the Scrivener 2.x templates post, click here.

If you've been working in Scrivener for a while, you probably have it set up exactly the way you like it. You've modified the labels, opened the Inspector, created your own extra folders and files for things like unused scenes, research, productivity tracking, character sketches, and saved searches. Maybe you like to have twenty chapter folders all formatted correctly, ready and waiting to fill.

However you like to set it up, you'd probably prefer not to have to do it again every time you start a new project. As always, there's a fix for that. Scrivener allows you to save templates. If you use Scrivener to write both novels and screenplays, you can create a template for each.

To get started, you can open a new project and set it up, or take an existing project that's set up the way you like it, make a copy in Finder, and then open it in Scrivener. If you use an existing one, strip out everything that's specific to the existing project (labels, text documents, research documents, etc.) and then save it.

Once you have your blank shell you're ready to proceed.

From the File menu, choose Save As Template…
Enter the Template Name and a Description

Now, you're ready to create a new project using your template.

From the File menu, choose New Project (or choose New Project next time you open Scrivener)
Select the template you want to use and click Next.
– Note: The Templates… drop down box at the bottom will allow you to import templates from other people, export your templates to share with others, delete existing templates, and choose to make the selected template the default.
Enter your Project Name and you're done.

Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.

And, I'd love to hear suggestions for future Tech Tuesday posts. Write on!

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Tech Tuesday: Project Replace in Scrivener

March 23, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life20 Comments

If you change your character's name from Rob to Joe, and you don't set it up correctly, you could end up with odd words in your manuscript, like “PJoeably”, “Joe a bank”, and “thJoe”. Of course, Scrivener's Project Replace feature has a couple of important options to ensure that you only replace the desired instances of a word within your MS.

To access the Project Replace feature, click the Edit menu, select Find, choose Project Replace…

Ignore Case: Will replace all matches, regardless of capitalization. Not recommended when replacing names or acronyms. NOTE: Ignore Case only applies to the Replace box, not the With box. If you type “Joe” in the With box, it will replace both “Rob” and “rob” with “Joe”.

Whole words only: This will avoid the “pjoelem” discussed earlier. If this is checked, Scrivener will only mark “Rob” or “rob” (depending on your case choices) for replacement. Great for replacing “pin” with “needle” without changing “hoping” to “honeedleg”. 😉 Bad for proper nouns where you may have possessive or contracted forms (e.g. Rob's, Rob'll).

Both unchecked: All instances of the letters matching the case you've used in the Replace box will be marked for replacement, regardless of their appearance within another word. In the picture example above, “Rob”, “Rob's”, “Robbing” will be affected, but not “rob”, “probe”, or “ROB”.

Both checked: The exact word entered in the Replace box will be marked for replacement, regardless of case. In the picture example above, “Rob”, “rob”, and “ROB” will be affected, but not “Rob's”, “robber”, or “probably”.

Scope: Check the documents you'd like to be affected by the replace action.

The easiest way to understand Project Replace is to play around with it yourself. If you're nervous about what Scrivener will replace, you might first use the Project Search feature (covered in last week's post) to see what it returns for a match. Or you can double-check the results using Project Search after you perform the Replace.

Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.

Write on.

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Tech Tuesday: Advanced Searches in Scrivener

March 16, 2010Gwen HernandezTech Stuff11 Comments

Well, last week's Tech Tuesday post on the cool search engine WolframAlpha went over like a lead balloon, so this week it's back to Scrivener to learn about advanced search features.

The easiest search to use in Scrivener is the Project Search, which is available from the Search box in the toolbar. You type in the word, word part, or phrase you're looking for, and a list of all documents containing your search string will appear in the binder. Click on each document to see the search string highlighted wherever it occurs in that file.

Simple!

To close the search results, click the small X at the bottom right corner of the Binder panel.

Now, what if you want to limit your search to your synopses, or you want it to be case-sensitive? Never fear, there's a menu for that. Just click on the magnifying glass (see image below).

If you find yourself performing the same search repeatedly, click on Save Search As Collection. The saved search will retain all of your preferences, and show up in your Collections with the title you provide. Go to View–>Collections–>[name of saved search] to run the search anytime and view the results.

One last note about searching. If you only want to search within the individual text document you're working on, go to Edit–>Find–>Find, and fill out the dialog box.

As always, for more information, check out my book or online courses.

Now that you know how to search, next week we'll discuss Project Replace. Happy hunting!

Need more help? Sign up for an online class, read more Scrivener articles, or schedule a private training session. If you don't already have it, you can download Scrivener here.

[Updated 8/25/14]

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Tech Tuesday: Wolfram Alpha

March 9, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life

Want to know what time the sun will set on November 1, 2010 in London, England?
4:35 pm–Crikey that's early!

Need to know the weather in Boston on July 15, 1980?
Partly cloudy, high 91°

Looking for the population of Ghana?
2.34 million

Does your algebra student need help finding the roots of x³+2x²?
-2, 0

Then you need Wolfram Alpha!

Okay, I know I usually focus on Scrivener during Tech Tuesday, but in deference to the writing friends I haven't been able to convert yet, I thought I'd discuss an amazing resource on the web. 😉

Wolfram Alpha was designed by Stephen Wolfram, a really smart guy who had a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by age 20. The goal of his website is “to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity”.

As a writer, that means a wealth of data at your fingertips. It's especially good for things that can be charted, graphed, calculated, or parsed. If you want to read an article about Siberian tigers, check Google. If you want to know what kingdom, phylum, and class they're in–and their alternate names (like Amur tiger)–try Wolfram Alpha.

Interested in learning more? Click on the link above to go to the home page, or check out the video introduction by Mr. Wolfram himself. Amazing!

Warning: Wolfram Alpha may induce procrastination. I recommend a timer, or a friend who can stage an intervention. Have fun!