Compile does not ever modify the contents of the binder, or their ordering. You would need to arrange things that way yourself, probably with a Collection and then compiling using that as your source (instead of Draft). I can say that sorting by keywords is a bit touch and go though, unless every item only has one keyword assigned. It gets more complicated when some have two, others have ten, etc.
As for printing the keyword as the title, the post you quoted is how you would do that—it uses labels for the example, but you could use the keyword placeholder instead.
Ok, thanks. So…it sort of feels like I do, in fact, need to create Collections after all – that is, if I want to create an output in which I have documents organized by Keyword sections, correct?
Actually, I really want to save these documents to a sharable file (e.g., Word / .docx), not print them.
Putting that aside, can you walk me through how to use the keyword placeholder with the aforementioned set up? Sorry – I might b missing something in the 2.0 set up.
Originally, I believe you were creating one collection for each and every keyword and running into issues with having so many of them. That is why I suggested that you could simply use the Keywords panel to call up a list whenever you wanted, rather than storing lists of lists.
That is different from having one big collection list organised by whatever axis you prefer—be it keywords or modification date, and then using that to compile with.
No, that’s why you would have one big list of items sorted by whatever you want.
It’s pretty much the same thing you did before. The only thing different from the previous setup is that you would disable the Title checkbox (I think?), and then edit the prefix/suffix to use the <$keyword> placeholder instead of the label.
One other thing of note, since you’ll be using a collection to compile, everything will be on “level 1”.
Something else to consider, if you don’t need to print any actual content and are just wanting to print metadata, is §25.4, Exporting Meta-Data to a Spreadsheet, pg. 426 in the user manual. It might be easier to do what you want in Excel, I mean to say.
Yes, that’s true. But I also want to share a document in which keywords and sources could be seamlessly compelled and shared with my colleagues.
I guess I’m not following that point; I don’t quite understand why it’s not possible to compile all of my Collections into one document. There’s really no way to do that?
And so, does that mean that I’m going to have to run individual Compile sessions to produce all of my keyword collection sets??
Ok, thanks. I’ll take a closer look at that – esp. after I get an answer to the last question I raised here. Thanks again for your help!
It is not a use case that has been anticipated by the way the feature is designed. The ability to compile by collection was added to make it possible to work with alternate ordering, or to create filters against the main draft. They were never meant to be used like folders, where one can just compile all of their collections one after the other.
That’s one way you could do it, but like I said before, I think using one larger sorted collection is going to be the most efficient approach. Does sorting by keyword in the outliner get you pretty close to what you want? If so, you can drag that sorted view into a new collection to add the items in that order. I’d do it like this:
Use Project Search to search for “*” (which returns everything).
Set the search settings to only look in Keywords (which changes “everything” mean only things with keywords assigned).
Click on the “Search Results” header bar to load the search results into the main editor, and switch to Outliner mode.
Add the Keywords column if necessary, and then click on the column header to sort by it.
Thanks so much for this! Ok, I’ve been trying this, but I’m not quite there. Quick questions…
-Do you literally mean just inserting a single asterisk in a Project Search?
-I ask because I did include a single asterisk in a Project Search, then selected Keywords (though the list seems a little short, but maybe it’s fine), and then I’ve switch to Outliner mode, but then…there’s nothing in the main window. What am I overlooking?
-I did add the Keywords column, but that didn’t seem to affect anything. What else would you suggest that I do?
No worries, my over-explaining is an attempt to help with that larger understanding, rather than a specific yes/no type understanding.
So yes, just an asterisk. When project search results seem incomplete, check the other settings and make sure there are no undesired constraints (like only searching excluded documents from the draft folder). But if everything looks fine, try setting the search type back to “All” and spot check items you feel should have keywords; make sure they really are assigned.
As for the rest, it’s hard to say, maybe a screenshot would help, but there is one step that is very important in there worth clarifying: you clicked on the “Search Results” header bar above the binder sidebar, right? That is what loads the sidebar list into the main editor. Otherwise you may just be turning outline mode on for whatever file you had selected incidentally—and its outliner is going to be empty since it has no child items.
Thanks so much - again! I genuinely appreciate your “over-explaining”! Again, I just want to be careful as not to ask for too much or something unreasonable. That’s all.
Ok, the good news I think I got this to work. I’m honestly not sure what settings I used to achieve the desired result, but now I see the text appearing in Outline mode! Well, there’s one small problem, which is that this Project Search looks like it has turned up selections of text that do and do not have Keywords. Super quick questions…
-Is there some way to set up the “Project Search” so that it only includes Keywords?
-With the “Project Search” I’ve got the following selections: “Keywords” (under Search In); “Exact Phrase” (under Operator); “Search ‘Included’ Documents” and “Search ‘Excluded’ Documents” (under Options). That’s it. Should I include / exclude anything else within the the Project Search?
-Also, am I saving this as a Collection?
-If not, just so I’m clear, how do I go from this set up to Compiling this? When I hit Compile, it looks like it reverts back to the raw draft.
-I feel like I need to answer that question first, before I press on with understanding the exact steps you were suggesting in the Formatting section within Compile…
Thanks so much again for your help – and patience! Feels like I’m getting there, thanks to your help!
The project search settings you describe will only return documents that have a keyword assigned, yes.
My suggestion was to use one larger collection rather than a bunch of small ones, so mechanically there is no difference between these two things, except you’re done compiling after the first collection of course. But it sounds to me as though you haven’t created a collection from your search results yet, as described earlier. So there might be a little cart before horse problem here.
Right. I agree. So, why do you think my Project Search is also including text that does not have Keywords? What should I do to fix so that it only captures split text that has Keywords?
Maybe you could provide us with a little example—maybe three binder items or so, showing a case with all three returned in project search but only one or two of them actually have keywords assigned.
Thanks, I’ve had a look at the data and I’m not seeing what you are. When I search for an asterisk in the Project Search tool I get 19 results, each of which has at least one keyword assigned.
If I change the search mode to “All” from “Keywords” then I get 38 items. I click on the binder sidebar header bar to load all 38 results into the outliner, and then sort by the Keywords column in the outliner (so as to group up all of the items with keywords) and select them, then press ⌥⌘O to open this selection into the current editor as a multiple selection, the footer bar reads 19 items—the same as when I search for all items with keywords.
To explain the attached demonstration that I returned to you:
The binder sidebar is set to search for all items with keywords (19).
The editor has been split horizontally:
[list][*] In the top editor is the multiple selection I created with the above described process.
In the bottom editor is the Search Result view, obtained by activating that editor and then clicking on the binder sidebar header bar.
[/*:m][/list:u]
Ok, I think I cracked it. Seems, for some reason, the Outline mode hadn’t selected / referred to the 19 results.So, in the future would you suggest that I just click on those result and hit select all? Or is there some other approach / shortcut you’d suggest?
So, for there it seems like a good way to proceed is to save the * search as a collection, then select that * collection when compiling and proceed from there, correct? Just want to be sure I’m on the right cause before asking more questions about that… Thanks!
It won’t do that by default. Search results are primarily displayed in the binder sidebar, so you have to load them into the main editor specifically (where you can then view them using any of the editor’s view modes, such as Outliner).
That would be a handy one to save, yup. As to whether you’d want to compile that directly, that’s up to whether you want the list sorted by keywords or not. Compile will just use the collection order, which for searches will always be the binder order.
So if you want a sorted collection to compile from:
First load your * keywords search collection into the sidebar.
Click the binder header bar to load it into the outliner and sort by keywords.
Select All from sorted outliner, and use the Documents ▸ Add to Collection ▸ New Collection menu command.
The neat thing here is that Scrivener uses the sorted selection to populate the new collection list. From there you can fine tune the sorting by hand and then compile that collection.
Going forward, you could manually keep this collection up to date with new documents, or regenerate it from scratch using the above checklist (only instead of creating a new collection in the third step, reuse the existing one). Which approach to take will depend on how much effort you put into fine tuning it.
Thanks very much for your help with this. I think I follow what you’re suggesting, but you lost me on your suggested approach in the last paragraph. Can you explain a bit more what you mean? I’d certainly like for the collection to regenerate, but I’m not clear on the fine tuning I’d have to do to enable the kind of recurring Keyword organization. Thanks again!
