Someone tweeted something about managing icons, but then seems to have deleted the tweet, as it doesn’t come up any more on a Twitter search.
Went looking for Manage Icons and found it, but it’s just empty fields with pluses and minuses. Story? What’s it for?
Did you try looking in the help file (“Scrivener Manual” from the “Help” menu inside Scrivener)? It’s a PDF file - open it in Preview and search for “Manage Icons”. This will reveal a whole section in the manual (12.5) dedicated to answering your question. 
There’s also a video tutorial that covers this on our video tutorials page - it’s the one entitled “Document Templates & Custom Icons”.
Thanks, KB, I should have thought of the manual, which I have saved on my desktop. I tried looking at the tutorial, but the images and text are too small for my weak eyes to be able to see them on my screen (a 13" Macbook).
Hm, looked in the manual, and this is all it says:
"A number of icons are provided with Scrivener for use in your projects, but you can also create your own (or download some) and import them by choosing “Manage Icons…” from the Documents > Change Icon menu.
“In this way you can customise your projects to contain whatever main folders you need (note that you can assign custom icons to individual documents, too, but the feature is more likely to be useful for customising folder icons). If you create a Scrivener project from one of the templates that are provided (such as the novel template), you will find folders in the binder that have been created and customised in just this way.”
Unfortunately, I’m still baffled.
There’s more. Look on page 101 (A4 edition), and there are instructions there, under “Custom Icons”.
As that section indicates, you can also import others, to add to those Scrivener provides. AndreasE provided some for download in the thread on this page in the forum.
H
What I have doesn’t seem to have pages, only steps.
The User Manual from the Help menu (or if you downloaded it from the website) talks about managing custom icons in section §12.5–like Hugh said, you should be able to do a “go to page” in your PDF viewer and go to page 101 and find it around there, but you can also search for “custom icons” which should bring up that section.
Basically, as you’ve probably seen already, you can change the icon for documents and folders in the Binder by right clicking on the document and choosing “Change Icon” and then selecting from a set of icons Scrivener provides. You can also add your own icons (that you’ve made or downloaded from a website, etc.) by choosing the “Manage Icons…” option from the list, which then lets you add icons (hit the “+” button) by importing them from your hard drive.
There are two locations you can store your icons: in the project package or in the Application Support folder. Icons that you put in the project package are only available to that project, but since they are stored in the MyProjectName.scriv package, they are accessible wherever the project goes–so if you work on different computers or work with a collaborator, etc., you’ll want to choose this option to make sure the icons get stored with the project. Putting icons in the ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Icons folder will make the icons accessible to any of the projects on that computer, but since they’re external to the project itself, if you move the project the icon won’t go with it and the document will revert to using the default icon.
Icons end up at 16x16–it’s best to use that size, or something close, but Scrivener will resize as necessary. You can use several different formats (I’ll have to check on which specifically, definitely .png, .tif, .jpg) but some will get converted to .png automatically when you import them (which shouldn’t really make any difference to you).
The manual goes through in more detail in that section, but does that help some then to just explain what it’s about?
Maelduin,
Are you sure you aren’t looking at the Interactive Tutorial (also to be found in the Help menu) rather than the Manual?
H
Good call, Hugh, I think that’s what’s going on, because the pasted excerpt above uses a different menu name description style than the manual does.
Maelduin: To open the user manual, you’ll need to click on the “Help” menu in Scrivener. You should see right at the top of the menu an entry for “Scrivener Manual”. Click that and it will open a PDF file in your preferred PDF viewer (like Preview or Skim).
(Note, your menu might look slightly different depending on your OS version; it may not have the search box at the top)
Ah yes! Thank you. And how do I go to a particular page, please? I can’t see any page numbers.
Ach, don’t worry, searched for ‘Icon’ and found it. I can’t see how to save an icon to 16 pixels, but no matter.
If you’re viewing the PDF in Preview, you can use Go>Go to Page (opt-cmd-G) and go to page 101.
It will convert it to 16 pixels for you, the extra information the manual provides is for those who know what do to in regards to optimising the graphic with an image editing program. If this is something you do not have, or have never got into learning how to use, then you can just ignore that whole bit and let Scrivener do the resizing.
Thanks for all the help. Trying out icons now.
I have another question about icons.
Is it possible to change the English names of the icons that come with Scrivener (Blackboard; Book (Blue); Book (Brown); Book (Red) etc.) into something else? I may have overlooked something, but I don’t see how this can be done.
Not without editing the Scrivener application package, no - these are actually file names, so there’s no way of localising them.
All the best,
Keith
Thanks, Keith! And are there any good reasons for not modifying these names, for leaving them as they are, or may they be changed as one likes?
The only problem would be that because they are contained inside the Scrivener.app file itself, every time you updated they would get reset to their original names. Out of interest, why would you want to rename them anyway? The names have no bearing at all really, and aren’t used anywhere else in the interface.
All the best,
Keith
Yes, I realize that every update will reset the original names, and imply the necessity to change these names another time.
And why this question? Well, I was thinking that perhaps it would be nice if one could make explicit the meaning or function given to certain icons. One could for instance (just to give an example) decide to use the Red Book icon for short poems, the Brown Book icon for riddles etc., and then it would be nice if one could rename the Red Book icon ‘short poem’, the Brow Book icon ‘riddle’ etc. It’s not terribly important; it was just a thought, and now I know that this is indeed possible, but that this renaming has to be repeated at every update.
Thanks again, Keith!
You could try something like this:
That might work better anyway, since some of the more generic and favourite ones would likely end up one thing in one project and another thing in another project. In the menu, whatever it gets changed to is how it would show up in all projects.
I’ll think it over, but you may be right, Amber. Thanks!