How Text Can Seem to Disappear

[TromboneAl]

This threw me a bit, though I wasn't worried.

In my binder I had a folder with some text files under it.

I right-click on one of the text files, and choose "Convert to folder" -- the text in the file is still present

I click on another text file, then click on the newly converted folder with text in it, and at this point, I'm shown the corkboard, and it seems like the text is gone.

The first time this happened, I just converted it back, and the text was there. I now realize that I need to click the Scrivenings option. Also, once I do that, the above scenario doesn't happen. That is, it automatically switches to Scrivenings mode, and the text doesn't seem to disappear.

I'm not sure what's happening here. It's not a problem for me, but I bring this up in case you don't mean this to happen.

[MimeticMouton]

This is intentional. Folders will always open using the current Group View Mode, whereas text documents always appear in the single text mode. Either can be changed while you're viewing the item in the editor, and the group mode will be remembered for the editor, so when you select a different folder, it will use that same view (whereas single text documents will revert to using the text view, since this is almost always what is wanted).

When you converted the document to a folder, the next time it was loaded it used the current group view mode, which was the corkboard in your case. Changing the view mode to Scrivenings caused that to be the editor default for any subsequently loaded groups.

You can also use a single-text mode on folders (and document groups) by deselecting all the group view modes, i.e. click on the Scrivenings button again to disable that and view just the folder's text without also viewing its subdocuments.

[AmberV]

To get into the theory a bit, and how it is meant to be used in practice:

The first time this happened, I just converted it back, and the text was there. I now realize that I need to click the Scrivenings option.

You could also just disable the corkboard view by clicking the button for it again. That will often be more efficient than Scrivenings, which has to collate the contents as well.

As you note file containers, those files that have other files indented beneath them, do not act like folders by default. They will always show their text content, and the group view mode is option to them. So this can give you a little latitude in how you work. I like to use file containers for stuff that has text in the container node itself, just because it’s more obvious and usually I want to see the text when I click on it, no matter what my current view mode preference may be. For empty containers, folders work better. Really, this distinction is here to give you the choice on how the software should react to your navigating within it (and it also gives you a more leverage for creating complex formats in the compiler, since you have two container types to work with—one can be “silent”, producing no visible book structure, while the other prints chapter headings and such).