Tip of the Day Tweets

I’m not understanding what the text editor is, and when I went into help and searched on that term I found nothing.

When I have a document open and am in the document instead of the binder, Edit Scrivenings isn’t available.

The editor is covered in the “Getting Started > The Main Interface” section of the user manual. Briefly, it is the big part in the middle (if the Inspector is open; otherwise it is the big part on the right) that holds the text of your documents. It is where you type in words and edit what has already been written, hence, text editor. Make sure the blinking cursor is in the editor.

Okay, that’s what I thought, but it didn’t work, which is why I started searching on the term.

HOWEVER–I must have opened it, but not clicked in it. I would have sworn to you that I clicked in several files and never got the option for test stats–but this time when I did it, it worked. So clearly I was opening the various docs but not clicking IN them.

Once again, I thank you for your patience, both of you!

No problem, glad it’s working. The trick is that blinking cursor. If you don’t see it, for some reason you aren’t actually “in” the editor. A common mistake is clicking in the left or right margin padded area rather than directly on the text itself. The padding area is not technically in the editor, so your focus stays in the Binder.

Tip of the Day: To give highlight colours meaningful names (e.g. event related), use the panel from Edit > Find > Find Highlight… or press ctrl-cmd-H.

Tip of the Day: To get a word count for selected text, ctrl-click on the selection; the count appears at the bottom of the contextual menu. Plenty of count related information in our video on ‘Statistics’ literatureandlatte.com/videos/index.html

Tip of the Day: To assign a label or status to multiple documents, ctrl-click on the selected documents in the binder, corkboard or outliner.

Tip of the Day: Set up your own list of labels and status descriptions by going to File > Label & Status Setup… or by pressing alt-cmd-,

Tip of the Day: You can hide or show the header and footer bars in the editor pane(s) using View > Layout > Hide/Show Header/Footer View.

Tip of the Day: Hit cmd-. or opt-esc while typing to bring up the auto-complete list. Add auto-complete words to a Scrivener project via the Edit > Edit Auto-Complete List… menu item.

Tip of the Day: You can customise all keyboard shortcuts in Scrivener and other Cocoa programs via System Preferences: literatureandlatte.com/wiki/ … _Shortcuts

Tip of the Day: The two arrows (if activated - the icon goes blue when clicked) in the footer bar beneath the outliner and corkboard (when you are in the relevant mode) make the other editor (when opened) show the selected document. It is simple when you try! :wink:

Tip of the Day: Use the References pane in the Inspector (or press cmd-7) to create links to external files that you do not want to import into the project. You can see our ‘References & Links’ video for more information literatureandlatte.com/videos/index.html

Tip of the Day: You can give the corkboard a custom background image or a plain colour background via Scrivener > Preferences… > Fonts & Colors tab > Corkboard background:

Tip of the Day: You can add additional columns in the Outliner view by clicking the 3 dots (…) at the right of the existing columns. The likes of ‘Word Count’ and ‘Target’ information are then only a further click away.

Tip of the Day: To exit a search, either click on the ‘X’ at the right of search term field, or the ‘X’ in the footer bar of the binder.

Tip of the Day: The Formatting tab in File > Compile Draft… lets you choose how the text of your exported manuscript should appear. It doesn’t have to look anything like it does in Scrivener’s editor, if you do not want it to.

Tip of the Day: To make individual documents retain their format when using File > Compile Draft… (e.g. title pages), check Preserve Formatting in the Inspector.

Tip of the Day: Create custom project templates by setting up a bare bones project with settings you want and using File > Save As Template…

Tip of the Day: Switch between project and document notes by clicking on the Notes tab in the Inspector, then clicking on Document Notes. Project Notes can be viewed by any document.

Tip of the Day: Going to View > Customize Toolbar… provides a way for you to drag your favourite items to (or default reset) the toolbar.

Tip of the Day: Do not worry about the size of a Scrivener project in terms of disk space, or how many files you can put into it. :wink:

Tip of the Day: The default save location for Scrivener projects is your Documents folder. Cmd-click on the title bar (top of window) to see a file’s location.

Tip of the Day: Setting up Compile Draft correctly will allow you to print out a list of all the titles in your draft, including any synopsis or notes you may wish to include. literatureandlatte.com/wiki/ … d_draft.3F

Tip of the Day: Do not be concerned with proprietary formats. You should always (for the foreseeable future) be able to get your writing out of Scrivener using an RTF or HTML export.

Tip of the Day: A list of readily available Scrivener keyboard shortcuts, with a link to creating your own custom shortcuts literatureandlatte.com/wiki/ … _Shortcuts

Tip of the Day: You can change the language of the spell checker supporting Scrivener literatureandlatte.com/wiki/ … Dictionary

Tip of the Day: Edit Scrivenings allows you to edit multiple text documents as though they were one long document. This way, you can write in small chunks and then combine them in any way you like to see how they work together.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener allows you to create templates from your projects and to share them with others if you wish. ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/ProjectTemplates

Tip of the Day: Every document in Scrivener can have an associated synopsis. In the Inspector,
as in the Corkboard view, the synopsis is displayed as the text of an index card (which is
already a familiar way of storing synopses for many writers).

Tip of the Day: Full Screen mode allows you to edit your text in a distraction-free environment. You can view any text document or Edit Scrivenings session.

Tip of the Day: Edit > Edit Auto-Complete List… brings up a panel which allows you to add words to the auto-complete list for the current project. Great for character names, locations, or often recurring technical terms. Hit cmd-period or opt-escape when one or more characters of a word in the list have been typed to call on the feature.

Tip of the Day: You can double-click on the icon in the top-left of index cards in Corkboard mode and in the ‘Type’ column of Outliner rows to navigate into the relevant document.

Tip of the Day: Use Text > Scrivener Link to create hyperlinks within text documents or notes that point to other documents within the project.

Tip of the Day: Activating Text > Scriptwriting > Script Mode - Screenplay will turn Scrivener’s editor with focus into a place where you could possibly write the treatment or complete script for next year’s big stage or screen hit!

Tip of the Day: You can easily save a search by clicking ‘Save Search…’ at the bottom of the search menu. This will add the search criteria as a purple folder with a magnifying glass at the bottom of your Binder. Simply double-click the folder to run the search again. You can have as many saved searches as you wish.

Tip of the Day: Holding down the Option key whilst dragging in Outliner mode will disallow “Drop Ons”, making it easier to target between documents. This is very useful if you are rearranging a set of documents at the same level and want to avoid dropping them into one another.

Tip of the Day: The text editor in Scrivener uses the standard OS X ruler, which can be shown or hidden via Text > Ruler > Show Ruler or by hitting cmd-R.

Tip of the Day: To define your own styles, choose Styles > Other (in the ruler; cmd-R) to open the style editor. Navigate back and forth through the styles of your document or styles already saved. Click Select to select all ranges of text in the document that have the displayed style; click Apply to apply the style to selected text. To add a style from your document to the favourites, click Add To Favorites.

Tip of the Day: Drag and drop a document icon from the Binder, Outliner or Corkboard to create a Scrivener link to that document in the text (so that clicking the link will open the document). If the document is an image document, however, the image itself will get placed inside the text; to create a Scrivener link from a dragged image document, hold down the Option key whilst dragging and dropping it into the text.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener > Preferences… > General > Default Editor Width; the value you enter here will determine the width of the main editor pane after a zoom. Scrivener has a “smart zoom” feature whereby, when you click on “zoom” (either in the Window menu or by clicking on the green traffic light button in the top-left of the window), Scrivener will try to size the window to best fit the current visible elements.

Tip of the Day: Double-clicking on an image in the Editor will display the Image Tools HUD. You can then use the tools to rescale or rotate your image.

Tip of the Day: If typographer’s quotes are turned on (Scrivener > Preferences… > Typography), all speech marks and apostrophes get transformed into curly quotes instead of straight ones. You can toggle between curly and straight quotes by selecting a speech mark or apostrophe character and re-typing the speech mark or apostrophe.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener > Preferences… > General allows you to set a bibliography or citations manager such as Bookends, EndNote or Sente for academic work. Click on ‘Choose…’ to select your citations manager (usually from the Applications folder). If you set a citations manager here, you can hit shift-cmd-Y (or select Text > Bibliography/Citations…) to launch your bibliography application and bring it to the front automatically. You can then use your bibliography/citations application to paste a citation into Scrivener.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener automatically saves changes made to projects. If the user makes no edits for two seconds, Scrivener deems it a good time to auto-save without the process interrupting the user. Scrivener > Preferences… > General allows you can change the period Scrivener waits to auto-save.

Tip of the Day: By default, the “paper” colour in Full Screen mode is a pinkish-grey (to be easy on the eyes), and the text colour will be whatever you are using for the main document. You can change this via the Scrivener > Preferences… > Full Screen, so that you could even have a retro green text on black if you wanted!

Tip of the Day: If ‘Automatically show completions’ is checked in Scrivener > Preferences… > Text Editing, when in Scriptwriting mode, any auto-completions you have set in the ‘Script Settings…’ panel will pop-up automatically when you pause from typing.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener’s RTF importer supports footnotes, annotations and most images. To get Word documents with such features into Scrivener, first save them as RTF in Word and then import them into Scrivener in RTF format rather than DOC format.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener 2.0 will offer a plethora of choice when printing index cards or your project outline, but to currently print a synopsis of your work, use File > Compile Draft… and choose to include titles and synopses only.

Tip of the Day: File > Compile Draft… > Text Options > Convert italics to underlines is useful if you use italics for emphasis but want to export or print using the standard manuscript format in which emphasis is indicated by underlined text.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener > Preferences… > Fonts & Colors lets you customise the Corkboard background. Select “Corkboard pattern” to use the default Corkboard background; “Custom color” allows you to choose a background colour from the colour panel on the right of the pop-up button; “Custom background…” lets you select an image file from disk to use as the background image.

Tip of the Day: Scrivener comes with a number of templates via the Extras Installer, and you can easily create you own with File > Save As Template…

Tip of the Day: If ‘Use block insertion point’ is checked within Scrivener > Preferences… > Full Screen, the insertion point in the text will appear as an old-fashioned block - the sort popular circa 1980 (or in Terminal).

Tip of the Day: Not much of a tip if you’re already using Scrivener, but the application trial runs for 30 days of actual use. If you use it every day it lasts 30 days; if you use it only two days a week, it lasts fifteen weeks. Once the trial expires, you can export all of your work or buy a licence to continue using Scrivener.

Tip of the Day: Additional meta-data columns can be added to your Outliner view by pressing ‘…’ Sorting options galore are coming with Scrivener 2.0! :wink:

Tip of the Day: Users who prefer plain text may wish to set their default font and paragraph settings in Scrivener > Preferences… > Text Editing to something that emulates a plain text “feel”. For instance, you could set the font to Monaco 10-point (Monaco does not draw bold or
italics) and set the paragraph formatting so that there are no indents and no inter-line spacing.

Tip of the Day: View > Editor > Lock in Place locks the editor so that selections made in the binder will not change what is being viewed in the editor. When activated, the header view changes colour to indicate that the editor is currently locked in place.

Tip of the Day: You can check that you are running the latest version of Scrivener by going to Scrivener > Check for Updates… The current version is 1.54.

Tip of the Day: When you delete a file in Scrivener (by hitting the “Delete” key or by clicking on the “Delete” toolbar item), it is not irretrievably deleted. Instead, it is sent to the Trash folder in the binder, and there it will stay until the trash is emptied.

Tip of the Day: If you don’t like the alternating grey colour employed by Edit Scrivenings, you can change it via Scrivener > Preferences… > Fonts & Colors > Alternate scrivenings.

Tip of the Day: Use ‘Preserve Formatting’ in the Inspector to preserve the way a document looks in Scrivener’s editor when using File > Compile Draft… This is useful for chunks of text that require special formatting, such as letters or title pages.

Tip of the Day: When a search is performed (using either Edit > Find > Project Search… or the toolbar search), the binder is replaced with the search results table.

Tip of the Day: We have tutorial videos available in HD on YouTube youtube.com/. Search for ‘Scrivener Basics’. More videos will be uploaded soon-ish, revealing some Scrivener 2.0 features. :wink:

Tip of the Day: File > Import > Web Page… (or Add Web Page directly from the toolbar) lets you enter the URL of a web page that you would like to import into Scrivener. The web page will be imported as a web archive into the Research area of a Scrivener project. You can convert it to a text file afterwards by using Documents > Convert > Web Archive to Text should you wish to edit the file in your Draft area).

Tip of the Day: Use the “Templates…” pop-up button at the bottom of the assistant window from File > New Project… to import templates created by other users, and to export your own templates for sharing. Selecting “Select Current by Default” from the pop-up menu will cause the currently selected template to be selected every time that you go to create a new project.

Tip of the Day: Edit > Paste and Match Style (or shift-option-cmd-V) pastes the contents of the clipboard without any of its existing fonts and styles. Useful for when you have copied a range of formatted text but want to paste it using the style of the text into which you are placing it.

Tip of the Day: Documents > Merge will combine multiple selected documents in the binder, outliner or corkboard into one document. Text, synopses and notes are all combined into a merged text, synopsis and notes text respectively. The title, and meta-data such as label and status, are taken from the first selected document.

Tip of the Day: You can assign keywords to a document by dragging them from the Keywords HUD (Window > Show Keywords HUD) directly into the header view of the relevant document.

Tip of the Day: To resize an image within Scrivener, double-click on it. This will bring up the image scaling panel.

Tip of the Day: To analyse word frequency for the whole of your draft, select the Draft in the binder and enter an Edit Scrivenings session. Ensure that the editor has focus and go to View > Statistics > Text Statistics.

Tip of the Day: Goal oriented tools. Try clicking on the little “target” icon in the footer bar. You can set a goal for each document and when you get to that point, the colour of the target icon will change to green, letting you know you’ve surpassed the goal.

Tip of the Day: If Text > Typewriter Scrolling (or ctrl-cmd-T) is checked, the currently edited line will be vertically centred on the screen, much as it would be on a typewriter. If you find yourself suddenly jumping to the centre of the screen in Full Screen mode or the regular editor, this setting is the culprit.

Tip of the Day: You can completely reformat the text on export or for printing without affecting the original. Thus making it easy to export a manuscript in a format suitable for an editor, and then export it just as easily in a format more suited to publishing on the internet.

Tip of the Day: Self-indulgent tip requesting that you read the following blog post: literatureandlatte.com/blog/?p=133. Relates to the upcoming feature-set and release of Scrivener 2.0! :wink:

Tip of the Day: Tip of the Day: You can save a search by choosing “Save Search…” from the bottom of the search menu. When you close the search, after naming, you will find a purple folder at the bottom of the binder. Double-clicking on this folder will automatically re-run the search, filling in the search field with the saved search term and setting the appropriate options. You can have as many saved searches as you want.

Tip of the Day: The Statistics submenu (View > Statistics) allows you to gather information about the word and character counts of both individual documents and the project as a whole. The following video tutorial provides pertinent details literatureandlatte.com/video … ouTube.mov.

Tip of the Day: You can use the Highlights Finder panel in Edit > Find > Find Highlight… to give highlight colours meaningful names.

Tip of the Day: In order to highlight a PDF in Scrivener 1.x use View > Open in > External Editor to highlight the PDF document using Preview, Acrobat, Skim, et cetera. Save the changes. In Scrivener’s binder, switch to another document and then back again in order to see the highlights. This will be easier to achieve in Scrivener 2.0. :wink:

Tip of the Day: To split up text after importing, use Documents > Split at Selection (cmd-K) or Split with Selection as Title (option-cmd-K).

Tip of the Day: To assign keywords to multiple documents at the same time, select the relevant documents in the binder and then drag and drop the keywords onto one of them from the keywords HUD (Window > Show Keywords HUD).

Tip of the Day: Preferences only affect text formatting for new documents. For existing documents, use Documents > Convert > Formatting to Default Text Style.

Tip of the Day: To enter line breaks into synopses when editing in the corkboard or outliner, use Opt-return instead of just return.

Tip of the Day: Hold down the green “Add” button in the toolbar for more options. You can then add a folder or import a web page.

Tip of the Day: Entering <$p> in the header/footer field in File > Compile Draft… > Text Options will insert the page number into a compiled file.

Tip of the Day: RTF is by far the best export format. To export with footnotes, images, headers and comments intact, choose RTF.

Tip of the Day: You can convert a text file into a folder and vice versa via Documents > Convert > to File / to Folder.

Tip of the Day: To generate a synopsis from the current text selection, click on the button above the index card in the inspector.

Tip of the Day: To switch between project and document notes, click on ‘Document Notes’ in the Inspector (cmd-6 to get into the correct Inspector mode). Project notes can be viewed by any document.

Tip of the Day: Clicking on the icon next to the document title in the editor header bar brings up a menu that can be useful on occasion! :wink: Those occasions involving navigation, taking snapshots, locking the document in place, et cetera…

Tip of the Day: When the editor is split, the pane that is active displays an underline in the document title in its header bar.

Tip of the Day: Move the cursor to the bottom of the screen whilst in full screen mode to show the control panel, or the top of the screen for Scrivener menus.

Tip of the Day: To prevent the binder changing documents in a particular editor, use Lock in Place (opt-cmd-L); the header bar turns pink.

Tip of the Day: To create your own scriptwriting formats, use Text > Scriptwriting > Script Settings… Useful for custom formatting too.

Tip of the Day: Select multiple documents in the binder then enter full screen. You can use cmd-[ and cmd-] to navigate through the selected documents in full screen mode.

Tip of the Day: Prefer the Outliner to the Corkboard? Scrivener > Preferences… > Navigation tab allows you to choose which mode gets opened by default.

Tip of the Day: You can adjust the shadow on corkboard cards by moving the slider in the Fonts & Colors tab in Scrivener > Preferences…

Tip of the Day: Scrivener supports MultiMarkdown (MMD). MMD is a simple mark-up syntax that can be converted into LaTeX and XHTML.

Tip of the Day: Command-r (cmd-r) will quickly show or hide the ruler.

Tip of the Day: To strike through text, select it and hit shift-cmd-hyphen.

Tip of the Day: Shift-cmd-H highlights text using the last selected highlight colour.

Tip of the Day: Going to View > Customize Toolbar… provides a way for you to drag your favourite items to (or default reset) the toolbar.

Tip of the Day: Press the spacebar on supported documents in the binder to launch Quick Reference Windows youtube.com/watch?v=5k5BN1nc2KQ

Tip of the Day: While away some time in Edit > Writing Tools > Name Generator… P.S. Tick ‘Attempt alliteration’ and ramp up the ‘Obscurity Level’ if you’re just playing! :wink:

Tip of the Day: Comprehensive 300+ page PDF user manual is available in Scrivener 2.0 via Help > Scrivener Manual.

Tip of the Day: Searching for a synonym or definition? Try pressing ctrl-cmd-D whilst floating over the offending word.

Tip of the Day: To jump to the beginning or end of a section in a long Scrivenings session, you can quickly select the entire section with opt-cmd-A, then use the left or right arrow to jump to the beginning or end of the document.

Tip of the Day: Enjoy cooking? Check out the ‘Recipe Collection’ project template stored under File > New Project… > Miscellaneous.

Tip of the Day: Columns in outliner view can be sorted top to bottom, bottom to top, or unsorted by pressing the relevant column title header.

Tip of the Day: Use Documents > Favorites > Add to Favorites if you have a document within a project that you often want to link or refer to. It will become available in contextual menus.

Tip of the Day: To enter line breaks into synopses when editing in the corkboard or outliner, use Opt-return instead of just return.

Tip of the Day: When editing your documents in Scrivener 2.0, you can use Format > Revision Mode bit.ly/hW0Afv

Tip of the Day: Go to Help > Placeholder Tags List… within Scrivener 2 to see all the available tag variables.

Tip of the Day: If you are planning on exporting your work to an eBook, you may find this Scrivener tutorial video helpful bit.ly/byqpvq

Tip of the Day: When transcribing video or audio files, activate the pause and rewind button (lower right in editor window - it will turn blue) to automatically rewind a set number of seconds when pause is pressed. The rewind duration can be set under Scrivener > Preferences… > Navigation.

Tip of the Day: If you like looking at a page whilst writing, go to View > Page View > Show Page View in Scrivener 2: bit.ly/eEkKZ9.

Tip of the Day: You can personalise your Full Screen view by going to View > Full Screen Backdrop and choosing an image: youtube.com/watch?v=lsHBcZqWtMw