![]() Personally I would rather have a file format that’s neutral and forego the margin notes, but that’s a personal view. The reason for this is apparent when you consider that Scrivener’s underlying file format is RTF, a format that does not support margin notes. You can insert annotations and footnotes into the text, but these are inline with the document, not separated in to a margin. ![]() Notes is perhaps the one place where Jer’s Novel Writer trumps Scrivener, as JNW supports margin notes which Scrivener does not. There is space for a synopsis, label and status informations (very useful for keeping track of your editing), formatting information and a panel for document notes, key words and URL type references. By clicking on the blue Inspector button the right side-bar appears containing the meta-data for the text block. Main Window Showing Meta-Data (click to enlarge) ![]() It is extremely flexible and powerful.Īll this is very well, but what about the writing process itself? When you create a label you assign a colour to it and it is this colour which is then used for the virtual pin for the card on the cork-board, making the labels intuitively visible.Īll these features provide the writer with the ability to organise their work within Scrivener, and are a huge boon to large writing projects, regardless of whether you approach those as scenes within acts within parts or as blocks within chapters within parts. The might reflect a particular arc in the plot, an underlying theme or simply segmenting your work into chapters, themes, concepts and ideas. Labels are arbitrary text which can be used to categorise your text items or folders. ![]() This is also where Labels come in useful. Any changes made in the cork-board such as moving a card into a folder (shown as a card stack) or adding a new card are reflected in the outline on the left. Of course, the board in virtual, but the ability to re-organise the cards into the order you want and to add notes or synopsis text is still there. That brings us to the Cork-Board, which is a way of looking at elements as if they were inscribed on 3×5 index cards pinned to a cork-board. For instance, if chapters 2, 5, 7 and 12 deal with the arc of a certain character, you can highlight those and edit them as a single stream of text, ignoring the chapters in between. There is a feature similar to this in Jer’s Novel Writer, but the implementation here is smoother, allowing you to pick and choose which elements you want to edit. The concept of Scrivenings is initially hard to grasp, but if you think of them as a stream of text blocks stuck together so that you can edit them as a continuous stream you will not be far wrong. This is a good time to introduce Scrivenings. From this we can see that Scrivener is also a powerful tool for managing writing projects. This includes as default the item type, synopsis, assigned label and status, but can also include elements like word-count, creation date and progress bars. ![]() If we then move to the Outline View we can see those items represented in tabular form, with various attributes held against them. Rearranging your work is then simply a mater of dragging and dropping in the side-bar. How you structure these is up to you, but you can create folders and sub-folders, text files and sub-text files within that structure, allowing you to break up your work into chapters, scenes or whatever makes sense to you. This simple interface hides a great deal of functionality, preventing Scrivener from appearing daunting to the novice.Īs blocks of text are created in the tool they appear on the left in the outline. There is a button bar across the top with view and search options and a status bar at the bottom which controls the viewing scale and shows the word-count and target. The name of the item being edited is shown above the editing pane together with forward and back button so that you can skip back and forth between items like a browser. The initial interface presented by Scrivener is relatively simple, showing a rich text editing window together with a structure pane to the left. ![]()
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