Synchronising with Index Card for iOS

Index Card for the iPad and iPhone is a corkboard and outlining app that was partly inspired by Scrivener. It allows you to create projects comprising index cards (each of which holds a title, synopsis, and main text, just like Scrivener’s index cards) which can be moved around and edited on a virtual corkboard, or in a list view resembling Scrivener’s outliner. It is therefore an ideal companion application, and using Scrivener’s “Sync with Index Card for iOS” feature you can package up parts of your Scrivener project for editing and restructuring in Index Card on the iOS.

The synchronisation process involves creating a collection in Scrivener, saving it as an .indexcard file that can be read by Index Card, and later updating the collection in Scrivener from the updated .indexcard file written out by Index Card after you have made changes on the go. There are therefore four steps involved in syncing with Index Card:

  1. Creating a Collection to hold the documents to sync.
  2. Saving an .indexcard file to your Dropbox folder.
  3. Opening, editing and saving the .indexcard file in Index Card on your device.
  4. Updating the Collection in Scrivener with any changes you have made.

Because syncing with Index Card relies on Dropbox, which is a service that allows you to sync files between different devices that has a free option. Before you begin, you will need to ensure that you have Dropbox installed on your computer. You can download the desktop version of Dropbox here:

http://www.getdropbox.com

You will of course also need Index Card installed on your iPad. You can find out more about Index Card here:

http://www.denvog.com/iphone/IndexCard

Creating a Collection

Index Card projects consist of a single stack of index cards that can be moved around on a corkboard. Because Index Card expects a flat list of cards, it is not possible to sync the entire structure of a Scrivener project, or even all of the contents of the Draft folder, which will most likely contain documents inside folders several levels deep.

For this reason, the Collections feature is used to sync with Index Card. The Collections feature allows you to maintain different flat lists of any documents in the project, and which can be ordered however you wish. You should thus create a collection before you sync with Index Card. After editing your project in Index Card, you can easily assign your new arrangement of documents to the binder.

To create a collection, first select the documents you wish to take to Index Card in the binder. Next, click on the "Collections" icon in the toolbar to reveal the collections pane if it is not already visible (or select "Show Collections" from the View ▸ Collections menu). Finally, click on the "Add Collection" button:

collection-creation

A new collection will be created that contains the documents you had selected. You can rename the collection to anything you like, but something meaningful such as "Index Card Sync" might be a good idea. (You can change the colour of the collection by double-clicking on the colour chip in its tab when the collection is active.)

Adding Whole Folders To Collections: If you wish to include the contents of an entire folder in the collection, select the folder and hold down the Option key down while clicking on the “Add Collection” button.

To add other documents to the your collection, you can just drag them from the binder onto the collection tab:

drag-to-collection

Saving the Index Card File to Dropbox

We have now set up a collection ready for syncing with Index Card. The next step is to create a file in our Dropbox folder that Index Card will be able to read. To do so, use File ▸ Sync ▸ with Index Card for iOS.... The following sheet will appear:

index-card-sync-sheet

Sync includes main text and notes
This feature only works with newer version of Index Card, which support adding notes and main text to index cards, as well as synopsis. With this option, Scrivener will store the main text of your draft for that section into the text field for the card, and any document notes into the corresponding notes field in Index Card. This way you can not only see your cards and work with them, you can edit their contents too.
Do take notice that by default Index Card will not include notes in an exported .indexcard file. If that option is left off, no changes you make on the iPad to the main text will be updated in the project.
Take snapshot before updating main text
As with the other synchronisation tools, leaving this option on will automatically create a snapshot of the item prior to changing its text contents, providing an extra layer of safety.
Convert plain text paragraph spacing
If you have formatted your paragraphs with single breaks between them, this will optimise paragraph spacing to look good in a plain text file (which Index Card needs for the notes field). Likewise, paragraphs will be converted back to single breaks when updating the main text.
This option is not necessary (and indeed would be undesirable in most cases) if the source .scriv project already uses double-breaks between paragraphs.

Once you have everything set up, click on Create or Update Index Card File....

The “Save As” panel will appear, and it should automatically point to the “IndexCard” folder inside your Dropbox folder. Index Card creates the “IndexCard” subfolder in Dropbox whenever you sync, so if you haven’t saved any files from Index Card yet, it may not exist. If it doesn’t, create it yourself—navigate to your Dropbox folder, click on “New Folder”, and name the new folder “IndexCard” (with no space). You will need to use this folder, otherwise Index Card will not see your exported files.

Choose a name for the .indexcard file (or use the default one that has been entered automatically) and click on “Save”. At this point, an .indexcard file will be saved into the Dropbox/IndexCard folder, and the sync sheet will close. You are now ready to fire up your device and edit your index cards on the go.

Editing in Index Card on your Device

To open the .indexcard file on your iPad or iPhone, follow these instructions:

  1. Open the Index Card app on your iOS device
  2. If you haven’t done so already, tap on the ‘gear’ button and link your Dropbox account to Index Card
  3. Tap on the ‘gear’ icon from the main project list and select Copy from Dropbox
  4. Select the .indexcard file that you created in Scrivener (the title of the Index Card project will be the title of your Scrivener project with the name of the collection you synced in brackets). If you do not see it here, you need to make sure and save it to the “IndexCard” folder in your main Dropbox folder.

You should now be see the .indexcard file you loaded listed in the main project list. The title of the Index Card project will be the title of your Scrivener project with the name of the collection you synced in brackets.

You can now move the cards around, edit their titles and synopses, and create new cards, just as you would in any Index Card project.

Updating the Collection in Scrivener

When you get back to your computer, you’ll want to update your Scrivener project with the changes you have made in Index Card. To do this, you’ll first need to update the .indexcard file in the Dropbox/IndexCard folder, as follows:

  1. Click on the “Send” button in Index Card and select “Copy to Dropbox” from the list that appears, using the .indexcard format option.

    index-card-send

  2. iPad version only: If you are syncing main text as Index Card notes, then make sure the “Include Notes in Export” option is enabled at this stage, otherwise your text changes will not be included.
  3. At this point, Index Card, detecting that the file already exists, may ask you whether you wish to overwrite the existing file or save using a different file name. Choose to overwrite the existing file, if necessary.
  4. Now, back in Scrivener, go to File ▸ Sync ▸ with Index Card for iOS... again. The collection we chose to sync should already be selected for us in the pop-up button.
  5. This time, choose “Update Collection from Index Card File…”, because we want to update our project with the changes we made in Index Card.
  6. The standard Open panel will appear, and the .indexcard file that you edited should already be selected for you. If not, select it. Then click “Open”.

The collection in your Scrivener project should immediately be updated to reflect the changes you made on your mobile device—the order will be changed if you moved things around, the titles and synopses of any documents you edited will be updated, and any new index cards you created will appear as new documents in the collection. Additionally, when you return to the binder, you will find any new documents that were created have been placed in a folder below the Research folder, which will be named using the title of the collection followed by “Unsorted” in parentheses.

If you deleted any index cards in Index Card on the device, they will be removed from the collection in Scrivener but will not be deleted from the binder.

Committing Rearrangements to the Binder

Collections exist in parallel to the binder, allowing you to gather disparate documents from all over the binder in arbitrary lists in any order you wish. If you've spent a lot of time in Index Card on the iPad rearranging the cards and finding their most effective order, at some point you will want to take that arrangement to the binder rather than having it sectioned off in a collection. This is easy to do, and there are several ways of doing it. Here are the easiest:

  1. With the collection visible, select all of the documents in the collection list:

    collection-select-all

  2. Then, either:

Note that in both cases, the collection remains unaffected, and continues to exist separately.

When you next want to take your work with you on the iPad, once more ensure that the collection contains the documents you want to take, and go through the process again, overwriting the old .indexcard file with one generated from your updated collection.

Syncing Multiple Collections: It is possible to sync more than one collection in a project with Index Card—each collection will appear in Index Card as a separate project. However, bear in mind that if any documents appear in more than one collection, any edits you make to them in one Index Card project could get overridden were you to later sync with an Index Card project created from another collection that contains some of the same documents.

Also note that Scrivener will warn you if you try to sync with an Index Card file that was not created with the selected collection.

Thank You...

Many thanks to the developer of Index Card, "DenVog", who went out of his way to help get syncing to work between Index Card and Scrivener.