Tech Tuesday – Page 4 – Gwen Hernandez

Tech Tuesday: Binder features in Scrivener

March 2, 2010Gwen HernandezTech Stuff, Writing Life17 Comments

While checking out the Scrivener help recently, I came across some handy commands for the Binder–you know, the list of folders and files that appears along the left side of the Scrivener screen. I hope you find these as useful as I did.

Remember:

For contiguous selection, use the shift key
For non-contiguous selection, use the cmd key

Duplicate/Simple Duplicate – This useful feature allows you to make a replica of a document, or a folder that will retain the settings and contents of the original. In a recent post, I recommended creating a copy of a scene before you revise it. The Duplicate feature is a quick, easy way to do it. It's also great when making a structure of chapter folders that have the same properties (like when preparing a new project, or creating a template).

Duplicate – Will make a complete copy of a document/folder and all of its subdocuments, and add “copy – #” to the end of the new file.

Select the file/folder you want to duplicate.
From the Documents menu, select Duplicate.

Simple Duplicate – Same as Duplicate, but will not copy any subdocuments, or provide a distinguishing title to the new file.

Select the file/folder you want to duplicate.
From the Documents menu, select Simple Duplicate.

Group Files – If you don't like to group your scenes into chapters until you're done with the MS, this feature is for you. It will take the selected files and group them together into a new folder, all ready for you to name.

Select the files/folders you'd like to combine into one folder.
From the Documents menu, select Group.
Enter the folder name on the highlighted line.

Change the Label/Status of >1 document at a time – I've already talked about how to customize the Label and Status menus, but here's a helpful way to apply a Label or Status to more than one document at a time.

Select the files/folders to which you'd like to apply a new Label or Status.
Right-click (or ctrl + click for Mac) on the selection.
Point to the Label (or Status) menu item, and choose the value you'd like to apply.

Tint the Binder icons – This changes the file/folder icons in the Binder from white, to their Label color. It provides a quick visual reference. I use Labels for POV so I can quickly tell whose point of view a scene is in when this feature is turned on.

From the View menu, choose Tint Icons With Label Color

At the bottom of the Binder is a button that looks like a gear. If you press that, you'll get a useful menu that includes several of the items discussed above.

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.

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Tech Tuesday: Split screen in Scrivener

February 23, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life25 Comments

The split screen feature in Scrivener is a simple, easy-to-use tool, but I have some friends out there who weren't familiar with it. And it's very useful.

Here are a few ways you might use it:

– View the end of the previous scene while working on the opening of the next one.

– Compare two versions of a scene, either in Snapshots, or if you saved the previous version in a separate document.

– Copy text from one scene or document to another.

– Refer to your research files or photos while you write.

– Look at your manuscript's structure in the Corkboard or Outliner view in one pane, while you work on your scene in the other.

Turning on Split Screen

To activate the split screen, click the Toggle Split button (Mac), or the Horizontal Split or Vertical Split button (Windows), in the upper right corner of the Editor window. You can also go to View—>Layout to select your preferred style.

Mac

Windows

Mac users can hold down the Option key while clicking on the Toggle Split button to change the split type between horizontal and vertical.

Once you have your screen split the way you want it, the same document will be displayed in both panes. Click in the header or text area of an Editor pane and select (in the Binder) the file you'd like to view in that pane. As mentioned earlier, you can choose another text document, a file from your Research section (text document [shown below], web page, photo), or even the Outliner or Corkboard.

You can tell which Editor pane is active because the document title will be underlined in the Header, and the header color changes to blue.

Removing the Split

To exit split screen, click the No Split button (empty square button) on the pane you want to keep working on. On the Mac, it's the same button you clicked to enter split screen. On Windows, the right-most of the two buttons changes to No Split when you enter split screen.

Windows

Additional Resources

In the Tech Tuesday post about Snapshots and Unused Scenes, I mentioned that by creating a copy of a text document before you make revisions (instead of taking a Snapshot), you could use the Split Screen feature to easily compare old and new versions of the file (Mac only in 2.0). Now you know how. 🙂

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: 8/15/17

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Tech Tuesday: Snapshots and Unused Scenes in Scrivener

February 16, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life11 Comments

If you're planning to revise a scene (or whole section of your MS), it's smart to keep a backup of the old version in case you change your mind. Especially if you're making major changes.

Within Scrivener, one option for keeping the original version of a scene is through the Snapshots feature. It allows you to roll back to the old version of a document, and is a quick, painless way to save a document version before you edit.

You can even select multiple documents and take their snapshots all at once (Documents, Snapshots, Take Snapshots of Selected Documents).

Unfortunately, the only way to tell if a document has a Snapshot associated with it is by looking for a tabbed corner on the document icon. There's no list of Snapshots available.

For me, however, the biggest drawback to using Snapshots, is that you can't compare the earlier version side-by-side to the new version of your document, or to other snapshots of that file.

So what's a writer to do? I've created my own system.

Under the Research section in the Binder, I created a folder called Unused Scenes. This is where I store any scene that I've either taken out of the manuscript, or a copy of any scene I've drastically revised. I do this for several reasons.

Sometimes I want to mine the scene for use elsewhere in the MS.
I can compare the old and new scene side-by-side in the Editor pane using the Split Screen function.
I can quickly see which scenes I have old versions of.
Storing these scenes in the references section keeps them from being calculated in the word count, while leaving them easily accessible.

The Snapshots feature has its place, and I still use it frequently, however, for major revisions I prefer to copy the file and move the old version into my Unused Scenes folder.

I'm sure there are other ways to do this. Any ideas?

For great help on using Snapshots, choose Scrivener Help from the Help menu, or view the Snapshots video at the Scrivener Tutorial Videos page.

Happy editing!

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.

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Tech Tuesday: Word frequency in Scrivener

February 9, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life14 Comments

Need to get rid of those echo words in your manuscript?

A while back, I wrote about a web site called Wordle that lets you create a word cloud showing your most commonly used words. Fun and highly distracting, but not very practical for regular use.

As it happens, Scrivener has a built-in feature that will display the frequency of every word in your document, or group of selected scenes. Here's how:

Select the scene or scenes you wish to view.
(As always, shift+click for contiguous selection, cmd+click for non-contiguous selection.)
Click Edit Scrivenings.
Click inside the editing window and press cmd+A (or Edit, Select All), to select all of the text in the window.
From the View menu, choose Statistics, Text Statistics.
If necessary, click the triangle next to Word frequency to display the chart.
Click on either the Count or Frequency header to sort the words in descending order.

Voila! You'll want to scroll down to get past the, to, he, she, and so on, but it's worth it to have quick and easy access to your most frequently used words.

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.

Enjoy!

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Tech Tuesday: Split and merge in Scrivener

February 2, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life12 Comments

Have you ever created a long scene and then decided it should really be two scenes? Maybe there's a great hook in the middle, or you missed a time change. Or maybe you imported your MS from Word, and now it's one long scene that you need to break up into 80!

No matter why you need to do it, splitting scenes is amazingly simple in Scrivener. Here's how:

Place your cursor within the text where you want the split to occur.
Go to Documents–>Split–>At Selection.
Scrivener moves all of the text after your cursor into a new file with the same label as the original plus “-1”. For example, if my scene were called To Doctor, the section I split off would become To Doctor-1.

Voila! Scenes split. If you're splitting a large amount of text into many scenes, it's worth learning the shortcut for Split, which is Command+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows).

Okay, but let's say you wrote two scenes and they really should be one. Or you split a scene five months ago and you want to merge it back together. No sweat. Just use the Merge feature:

Select the scenes you want to merge.
– use Shift+click for contiguous scenes
– use Command+click (Mac) or Ctrl+click (Windows) for non-contiguous scenes
Go to Documents–>Merge.
Scrivener merges all of the scenes into the top selection, in order from top to bottom. So, if you merged Scene 1, Scene 2, and Scene 14, all of the text would be moved to Scene 1 (in order).

That's it! If you like shortcuts, you'll find them on the menu. The one for Merge is Shift+Command+M (Mac) or Ctrl+M (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.

[Edited 6/16/14]

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Tech Tuesday: Tracking progress in Scrivener

January 26, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life15 Comments

For the foreseeable future, I'm devoting Tuesdays to writing technology topics, usually related to Scrivener. Today's post shows you several ways to track your writing progress. If you have any requests relating to Scrivener, or other technical writing-related topics, let me know.

NOTE: Word counts in Scrivener are based on whatever you have selected in Compile Manuscript (under the File menu). So, if you've been printing synopses, you'll need to go back and select the Text checkbox, and make sure all files you want to count are selected.

My favorite tool for tracking my progress is the Project Targets box located under View, Statistics, Show Project Targets.

You can enter the overall target amount (in this case 80,000 words), and a target for each session. The session count is reset every time you close and reopen Scrivener, or when you press the reset button.

Until I found this, I was doing the math every day.

Another handy way to see how much you've written is the Project Statistics. This will show you total manuscript words, as well as the number of words in a selection of files. Use Shift+click to select a contiguous list of scenes or chapters (or Cmd+click for noncontiguous files), then click View, Statistics, Project Statistics.

What do I do with all of these numbers? Well, being the ANALyst that I am, I track my daily progress in a file called Productivity that I created under Resources section of the binder. It's just a text file where I include the date, final word count, net gain or loss, and any little notes to explain why I didn't hit 1000 words (revisions, etc). Maybe someday I'll even import it into Excel and make a pretty graph…

Happy tracking!

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.

UPDATE 9/20/10: If you just want to count the words in a selection of text (say several paragraphs out of a whole file), right-click (or ctrl-click) on the selected text to see the word count at the bottom of the pop-up menu.

UPDATE 2/3/11: For updates to Project Targets in Scrivener 2.x, see Project Targets in Scrivener 2.x.

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Full screen, label and status, printing synopses and notes

January 14, 2010Gwen HernandezWriting Life27 Comments

If you've been paying attention at all, you know I use–and adore–Scrivener for writing my MS. I use it for first draft, revisions, and pretty much until I'm ready to send it out. I export to Word only for the final formatting, read-through, super-fine polishing, and buffing.

Here are a few handy things to know. First of all, the Scrivener website has video tutorials that are very helpful. Also, if you're on Facebook, become a fan of Scrivener and you'll receive daily tips and tricks.

1. Working in full screen mode. Full screen mode is intended to take away the distraction of everything around what you're typing so you can focus. It offers the additional benefits of allowing you to change the background color to something you find pleasing, and keeping the line you're writing in the center of the page.

Click the Full Screen button on the toolbar.
Move mouse to bottom of the screen to get a disappearing tool bar where you can change some of the preferences, and exit.
You can also exit Full Screen by hitting the ESC key on your keyboard.
To change preferences such as background color, click Scrivener on the menu bar, choose Preferences, click the Full Screen button.
To work on more than one scene or chapter at a time, select them all using shift+click (for contiguous selection), or command+click (for non-contiguous files). Click Edit Scrivenings on the tool bar, then click Full Screen.

I've read that blue is a good background color for creative activities like writing, and red backgrounds are best for detail-oriented tasks like editing. Both are supposed to be good for boosting productivity.

2. Customize the Label and Status settings. It's easy to personalize the Label and Status drop-down menus in the Inspector window. You can change the name from Label to something else (I use POV, here), change the list items from things like “Chapter” and “Scene” to “Steve” and “Libby”, and change the colors used (I use pink for the heroine, blue for the hero, and other colors for any additional characters who get a POV scene).

If the Inspector window is not visible, click Inspector in the tool bar.
Expand the General pane, if needed, by clicking on the gray triangle.
Click the drop-down arrow next to Label (the box should have the words No Label in it if you're just getting started), and choose Edit…
In the Custom Title box, change the word Label to POV (or whatever you want to track).
You can then double-click the name of a specific label to change the text (say from Scene to Steve).
Double-click the color of the label to change its color.
Click the OK button, and you're ready to start assigning labels to your scenes.
You can repeat the above process with the Status drop-down menu, if desired.

Once you apply the label to a scene, the synopsis card, the file icon, and the index card will change to that color (if you have tinted icons or index cards turned on). If you're trying to determine quickly which character has the most scenes in their POV, color-coding can help.

UPDATE 3/23/10: I changed my Status menu to list the day and week to track my timeline. It's been very helpful to quickly see in the Corkboard where I am in the story (for example “Mon-1” for Monday of week 1). The options here are limited only by your imagination.

3. Print synopsis (or notes) only. Finally–for today, anyway–you can print your synopses. They will not come out looking like index cards, but instead like paragraphs.

Click File, Compile Manuscript.
On the Content tab, under the Document Elements section (bottom right), uncheck everything except the Synopses check box.
The default will include the # symbol between each scene (file). To change this, select the Text Options tab and change the separator under the Sections area (top left corner).
Choose Print…
UPDATE 1/15/10: This works for printing Notes, too. Just follow the steps above, but select Notes instead of Synopses.

Just like any software, you can learn a lot by exploring. Don't be afraid to check out a new button, or search Help.

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 Scrivening!

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