1

Scrivener’s main interface comprises the following:

• The list on the left is called the binder, because it acts as the
project’s ring-binder, being where you file and organise all of
your material.

• The editor contains the text you are reading right now, and is
where you’ll do all your writing. It can also show research
documents, such as images and PDF files.

• If you click on the “i” in the right of the toolbar (the strip of
buttons at the top of the window), you’ll open the inspector.
The inspector displays information relating to the document
currently shown in the editor, such as its synopsis, label and
status.

Let’s start by looking at the binder in a little more detail—in the

binder sidebar, click on the document entitled “The Binder”.

Using the Binder

The binder is the main navigation tool in Scrivener. You use it to
access different parts of your project, as well as to create new
sections and arrange them. (Note: we refer to each section in the
binder as a “document”, but each document can contain as
much or as little text as you like.)

The basics are simple:

• Click on a document to open it in the editor.

• Click on the triangle next to a folder or group to show or

hide (expand or collapse) its contents (subdocuments).

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• Drag and drop documents to rearrange them.

• Double-click on a document to rename it.

• Click “+” in the footer at the bottom of the binder (or in

the toolbar) to create a new document. (Cmd-N)

• To create a new folder, click the button containing a folder

with a “+” inside it at the bottom of the binder, or click the
down arrow next to the “+” button in the toolbar. (Opt-
Cmd-N)

• You can also add new documents from the Project menu
or by hitting enter when a document is selected and the
binder has the focus.

• Import files into Scrivener by dragging them from the

Finder into Scrivener’s binder. Alternatively, use File >
Import > Files… in Scrivener’s main menu at the top of the
screen.

Special Folders
Along with anything else you add, the binder always contains
three special folders that cannot be removed:

1. The Draft folder. Anything you want to be part of your

finished manuscript should be placed inside this folder.
Its contents will be compiled into a single document when
you export or print using File > Compile… Because the
Draft folder is used for building your manuscript, it is
unique in that it can only hold text files—you cannot
import image or research files into this folder.

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⁃ Tip: If you want an image in the text of your

manuscript, place the cursor inside a text document
in the Draft and use Insert > Image From File… to
insert the image into the text.

⁃ Note: All folders and files can be renamed, even the

special folders. In some of Scrivener’s project
templates, the Draft folder has a different name,
such as “Manuscript”.

2. The Research folder can hold text or media files (images,

PDF files, video files and more), and is the default storage
location for research materials not intended for inclusion
in the final manuscript. You don’t have to put all your
research files into the Research folder, though—you can
create other folders for your support materials anywhere
you want.

3. Whenever you delete a document, it ends up in the Trash

folder. Documents are not deleted forever until you select
Empty Trash… from the Project menu.

There’s Nothing Special About Other Folders

In Scrivener, there’s no real difference between folders
(excepting the three special folders) and text files. A folder is
just a special kind of text file that has a different icon and opens
in a different editor view mode by default (we’ll get to view
modes shortly).

You can convert a folder document to a text document and vice

versa easily. Try this now:

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• Ctrl-click (or right-click) on “Get Oriented” in the binder

(directly beneath the yellow “The Basics” folder).

• From the contextual menu that appears, select Convert to

File. Note how the folder icon becomes a text stack icon.

• Ctrl-click (or right-click) on “Get Oriented” again. You’ll

see that the option is now Convert to Folder—click it to
convert back. (You can also convert from the Documents
menu.)

So, whether you prefer to use folders or text groups is entirely

up to you, and you can convert between them at any time.
(Note: A text or file group is any non-folder that has
subdocuments.)

Searching
To search for documents in the project:

1. Click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar. A search field

will appear at the top of the binder.

2. Enter text in the search field. The binder will be replaced

with a purple search results list.

⁃ Tip: Click on the magnifying glass icon in the left of

the search field to change search options.

3. Click on the “X” in the left of the search results header bar
to return to the binder, or click on the magnifying glass in
the toolbar again.

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4. Click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar to hide the

search field if it is still visible.

You can also run a quick search for documents using Quick
Search field in the toolbar (which currently shows “The
Binder”, the current document name). This works like the
search field in Safari and brings up a menu of the top results.
This is great when you know the title of the document you want
to find.

Now let’s take a look at the editor—click on “The Editor” in the

binder.

The text you are reading now is contained in the editor. There
are several ways to load a document into the editor, but the one
you will use most often is to select a file in the binder, as you
did to load this one.

Scrivener’s editor can display a range of different file types, so

let’s try loading an image:

• In the binder, scroll down to the “Research” folder (you

might need to expand it by clicking on the triangle next to
it first) and then click on “Sunset”.

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• Once you’ve tested that out, return here.

Using the Editor

• The Format Bar appears directly below the toolbar. It
provides easy access to many common formatting
controls, such as bold, italics, paragraph alignment and
spacing, and highlights.

• More formatting features can be found in the Format

menu.

• The Insert menu allows you to insert images, tables,

footnotes, comments and other elements into the text.

• Edit > Find > Find… in the main menu or using the
keyboard shortcut Cmd-F brings up the Find panel,
allowing you to search through text in the editor.

• If you’re a screenwriter, playwright or comic writer, you

can enter scriptwriting mode via Format > Scriptwriting.
(You can also toggle between scriptwriting and regular
modes using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-8.)

The Header View

The header view (or bar) runs across the top of the editor and
contains the name of the document, along with providing some
useful tools.

Because in Scrivener you can break your writing up into

sections as large or small as you want, you’ll spend a lot of time
jumping between them in the binder. Frequently, you’ll simply

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want to return to the last document you were looking at. You
can do so using the history navigation buttons:

• Try clicking on the back button (the left-pointing chevron)

on the left of the header bar. It will take you to the
previous document you were looking at.

• Click on the forward button next to it to return here.

• The up and down chevrons on the right of the header

view work similarly, except that instead of navigating
through the document history, they take you to the next
or previous document in the binder.

Note: After navigating with the history buttons, the binder

selection may not match what is shown in the main editor.
(You can thus check back on a document you edited earlier
without losing your place.) When the editor shows a different
document to the one selected in the binder, a secondary light
grey bar appears in the binder to indicate the current editor
document.

Tip: Using Navigate > Reveal in Binder tells the binder to select
the document currently open in the editor.

Also in the header bar:

• You can Control-click (or right-click) into the header view

to bring up a menu of useful options.

• You can click into the title to rename the document.

• You can drag the icon shown next to the title in the same

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way that you can drag documents in the binder.

• You can drag a document from the binder into the header
bar to load it.

• The square icon on the very right of the header view will
split the editor, but we’ll come to that shortly.

The Footer View

The footer view is the horizontal bar beneath the editor. It will
contain slightly different controls depending on what is open in
the editor.

• When text is open in the editor, its word count is shown in

the footer view. (You can change this to show the
character count using Scrivener’s “Editing” preferences,
available from Scrivener > Preferences… in the main
menu.) Click on the word count for more information.

⁃ Tip #1: If the word count ever disappears from the

footer view, it is most likely because you have
switched on scriptwriting mode (see above).

⁃ Tip #2: To see the word count of your entire draft,

hover over the search field in the toolbar with your
mouse. Doing so will display a count of all the
words in the Draft folder (on the left) and a count of
the words you have written in the current session
(on the right).

⁃ Tip #3: You can set a word or character count target

for you manuscript via Project > Show Project
Targets. (You can also set targets for individual

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documents by clicking on the target icon in the

footer view.)

• You can change the current text scale (zoom) using the
percentage control on the left of the footer view. (This
does not change the font size; it just zooms in and out of
the document.)

• When viewing PDF files, the footer view allows you to

navigate between the pages. Click on “spacewalk_info” in
the Research folder to test this out, and then come back
here by clicking on the “back” arrow in the header view.

At this point, now that you know how to use the binder and
editor, you could go off and start using Scrivener, because the
binder and editor are the two features you’ll be using the most.
So if you’re itching to jump in, feel free to go and create your
own project (File > New Project…) and experiment. Just know
that, like Luke Skywalker at the end of The Empire Strikes Back,
you’re not fully trained in the ways of the Force just yet. Be sure
to come back to Dagobah here as soon as you’re ready to
continue your training.

Ready? Okay, click on “The Inspector” in the binder (or the

down chevron on the right of the header view) and let’s do
ourselves some inspecting.

Click the blue “i” icon on the right of the toolbar to open the
inspector. The inspector will appear as a third pane on the right
of the window, and it shows extra information associated with
the document that you have open in the editor.

At the top of the inspector you will see these buttons:

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These buttons change what is displayed in the inspector. From

left to right, they are:

• Notes: The document synopsis and notes.

• Bookmarks: Bookmarks associated with the document and

project.

• Metadata: Various metadata relating to the document.

• Snapshots: Snapshots you have taken of the document.

(Snapshots are older versions of the document.)

• Comments & Footnotes: Comments and footnotes

associated with the text in the editor.

The buttons available will change depending on what sort of

document is shown in the editor. For instance, “Snapshots” and
“Comments & Footnotes” are only available for text documents.

A dot in the corner of one of these buttons indicates that there is

content in the associated pane.

Let’s start by clicking on the Notes button. Once you’ve done

that, select “Synopsis & Notes” in the binder.

Synopsis Index Card

At the top of the Notes pane of the inspector is a virtual
index card, in which you can type a synopsis of your
document (the header of the index card can be used to

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rename the document, too).

A core idea behind Scrivener is that every section of the

project is associated with a synopsis which can be viewed
either alongside the section text (in the inspector) or
alongside other synopses (in the corkboard or outliner). This
allows you to switch between an overview of your
manuscript and its text.

Imagine it like this: each document in Scrivener is a sheet of

paper with an index card clipped to it. You can scrawl a
summary of the document onto the index card, and then you
can take the card and lay it out alongside other index cards
to work with the bigger picture. (We’ll see that bigger picture
when we come to look at the corkboard and outliner views.)

Notes
Below the index card is the notes area, where you can jot
down anything relating to the document that you don’t want
in the text itself, such as ideas and problems.

On to “Label & Status”…

At the bottom of the inspector are the label and status pop-
up buttons. (This document’s label is “Blue” and its status is
“To Do”.)

Label and status are simply arbitrary tags that you can
assign to a document. You set up the label and status tags
you want to use in a project by going to Project > Project
Settings… You might, for example, rename “Label” to
“POV” (for Point of View) and use it to record the name of

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the point-of-view characters in a novel, so that you can

assign a character to each scene.

Status works much the same way, except that it is meant to

keep track of the state of the document—for instance,
“Finished”, “To do”, “A Mess” and so forth—although you
can rename it and use it for anything you want. The only real
difference between label and status is that labels have
colours associated with them, and status items do not.

Tip: To assign a label or status to multiple documents, select

several documents in the binder, Ctrl- or right-click on
them, and select the label or status from the contextual
menu that appears.

Next, click on “Bookmarks” in the binder.

Click on the Bookmarks button in the inspector header bar

(the second icon).

The Bookmarks pane allows you to store references to other

documents in the project, on your hard-disk, or on the
internet.

To add a new bookmark, do one of the following:

• Click the gear button above the Bookmarks list.

• Drag a document from the binder into the list.

• Drag a file from the Finder into the list.

• Drag a URL from a browser into the list.

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Selecting a bookmark in the list opens the content of the

bookmark in the lower half of the inspector. You can see that
the “Key Concepts” document has been added as a
bookmark for this document, and that its text can be viewed
right there in the inspector. (Click on “Key Concepts” in the
Bookmarks list at the top of the inspector if its contents are
not visible.)

Double-click a bookmark to open it: external bookmarks

open in their default application; internal bookmarks open
inside Scrivener.

Bookmarks can be associated with either individual

documents or the entire project: click the bar labelled
“Document Bookmarks” to switch between Document
Bookmarks (specific to the current document) and Project
Bookmarks (available from any document).

Project Bookmarks
Project Bookmarks can also be accessed from the bookmarks
icon in the toolbar, providing fast navigation to frequently-
needed documents:

• Click the red bookmark icon in the toolbar. A list will

appear. I have already added the “START HERE”
document to the project bookmarks.

• Click “START HERE” in the list. The bookmarked

document will be opened in the editor.

• Hit the back button in the header view to return here

afterwards.

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Now select “Metadata” in the binder.

Click on the third button in the inspector header bar, the one
containing the tag icon, to open the Metadata pane.

Each document in Scrivener can be associated with different

types of metadata. Which metadata you use, or whether you
use it at all, is entirely up to you.

General Metadata
At the top of the Metadata pane is “General Metadata”. This
contains the following:

• Created Date and Modified Date: the dates on which

the current document was created and last edited.

• Include in Compile: if the document is inside the Draft

folder, this checkbox determines whether the current
document should be included as part of the final
manuscript when compiled.

• Section Type: used by Compile to determine how to

format the current document in the manuscript. We’ll
look at section types when we come to Compile.

Custom Metadata
In the middle of the Metadata pane is “Custom Metadata”.
By default, this pane is collapsed, but you can expand it by
clicking either the “Custom Metadata” header bar or the
disclosure triangle next to it.

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Custom Metadata allows you to add your own checkboxes,

pop-up menus, dates and text fields so that you can keep
track of any information that doesn’t fit elsewhere.

You can set up custom metadata by going to Project > Project

Settings… or by clicking the gear icon at the top of the
Custom Metadata area. Once you’ve done this, the custom
metadata for each document can be viewed and edited either
in the inspector or in the outliner.

Keywords
You can add arbitrary keywords to your documents to make
searching for them easier, or to make keeping track of what
is in a particular document easier. For example, you could
add keywords for characters that occur in a scene, themes
referenced or topics discussed.

To add a keyword: Click the “+” button in the Keywords

header bar or hit enter while another keyword is selected.

You can also assign keywords via the keywords panel.

1. Click on the gear icon in the “Keywords” header bar.

2. Select “Show Project Keywords”.

Alternatively, go to Project > Show Project Keywords in the

main menu.

Do so now. A panel appears showing all keywords in the

project. Here you can create, organise and delete keywords,
as well as search the project for selected keywords.

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To change the colour associated with a keyword, double-

click on its colour chip in the keywords panel.

Drag keywords from the panel to the inspector list to assign

them to the current document, or drag and drop them onto
documents in the binder, outliner or corkboard to assign
them to selected documents there (you can assign keywords
to multiple documents this way).

Try dragging the keyword entitled “Assign this one” from

the keywords panel to the keywords list in the inspector
now.

Okay, on to “Snapshots”.

Scrivener’s Snapshots feature keeps older versions of your

documents around for reference. To capture a version before
embarking on a major edit of a document, select Take
Snapshot (Cmd-5) in the Documents > Snapshots menu. Try
that now (you will hear the sound of a camera shutter which
indicates that the snapshot has been taken).

Once you have taken a snapshot, you can edit your

document safe in the knowledge that you can return to the
older version whenever you want.

Click on the “Snapshots” button (the one with the picture of

a camera on it) in the inspector header bar to see what I
mean.

• The inspector now shows a list of snapshots at the top,

which should consist of the one you took and one I
took while writing the first version of this tutorial way

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back in 2006.

• Clicking on a snapshot in the list reveals its text in the

lower part of the inspector.

• Restore an older version of your text by selecting the

version you want from the list and clicking on Roll
Back at the top (at which point, you will be given the
option of taking another snapshot of your current
version).

Note: You can immediately tell which documents have

snapshots associated with them because their icons have
dog-eared corners.

To see what’s changed in the document since the snapshot

was taken, click on “Compare”. Try that now:

Type some text on the line below (anything you want):

Delete the text in the following line:

DELETE ME!

Now:

• In the inspector, select the snapshot you took a

moment ago.

• Click “Compare”. See what happens?

⁃ Text that has been added to the document since

the snapshot was taken appears underlined and

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in blue.

⁃ Text that has been deleted appears struck out and

in red.

⁃ Note that the comparison only shows textual

changes—it does not show changes to the
formatting.

• Click on the left and right arrows at the top of the

inspector, next to the gear button, to navigate between
the changes.

Tip: You can alter the granularity (level of detail) of the

comparison by clicking on the gear button next to
“Compare” (which should now read “Original”, because
clicking on it again will turn off the compare feature).
Changing the granularity will give different results for
different documents, depending on the scope of the edits.
You will usually achieve the best results by leaving “By
Paragraph” ticked but playing with “By Clause” and “By
Word”.

You can also compare the differences between two snapshots

by selecting them both in the list and clicking on Compare.

Let’s move on to “Comments & Footnotes”.

Now we’ll look at the “Comments & Footnotes” pane—don’t

worry about clicking on the button in the inspector header
bar just yet, though.

Click on the yellow highlighted text in the sentence below:

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This sentence has a comment attached.

Note how the inspector automatically switches to the

Comments & Footnotes pane, and the comment associated
with the text gets highlighted.

Next, click on the grey footnote directly below the comment

in the inspector.

This sentence has a footnote attached.1

See how clicking on the note in the inspector automatically

selects the text associated with it in the editor?

If you click on a note in the inspector, the editor

automatically scrolls the text to where the note is located. Try
scrolling to the bottom of this document, and then clicking
the comment in the inspector to return to the top.

Tip: If the comments aren’t open in the inspector and you

don’t want to show them, Opt-click or Cmd-click on a
comment or footnote to open it in a popover instead of in
the inspector.

Adding Comments and Footnotes

Let’s try adding some comments and footnotes of our own.
First, select some of the text in the following sentence:

Select some of the text in this sentence.

1 This is a footnote. For footnotes to be exported properly, it’s important to add

them in such a way that the link ends exactly where you want the footnote to
appear in the text.

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Next, do one of the following:

• Click on the paperclip icon in the toolbar and select

Add Comment from the menu that appears.

• Click the comment icon in the “Comments &

Footnotes” bar of the inspector.

• Go to Insert > Comment in the main menu (or hit Shift-

Cmd-8). A new comment will be created in the
inspector ready for editing.

Then:

• Add some text.

• Hit the Escape key to return the focus to the editor.

You add footnotes in exactly the same way, but choosing

Footnote in the menu or clicking the “cf” icon in the
inspector.

Note: It doesn’t matter where you attach comments, but

with footnotes you should always ensure that the footnote
link (the grey highlight) ends at the place you want the
footnote number to appear when printed or exported.

Changing the Colour of Comments

To change the colour of a comment:

1. Ctrl- or right-click on a comment in the inspector.

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2. Select a colour from the menu that appears.

3. You can also hit Shift-Cmd-C (or go to Format > Color in

the main menu) to open the colour palette and choose
a custom colour.

(You cannot change the colour of footnotes, which are

differentiated from comments by all being grey2.)

The contextual (Ctrl-click) menu also allows you to convert

comments to footnotes and vice versa, and to revert
comments and footnotes to use default formatting (which
can be set in the “Editing” pane of the Preferences).

Tip: If you have a lot of comments, you can collapse

individual comments and footnotes by clicking on the
disclosure triangle (the downward-pointing arrow) in the
top-left of each comment box.

Right, that’s the inspector covered! Now let’s take a look at

composition mode. By now, you know the drill: click on
“Composition Mode” in the binder.

Composition mode blocks everything else out so that it’s just you
and your words. To enter composition mode, try one of the
following:

• Click on the square, grey icon next to the blue inspector icon
in the toolbar.

• Hit Opt-Cmd-F on the keyboard.

2You can choose a different colour for footnotes via the “Appearance” pane of
Scrivener’s Preferences.

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• Go to View > Enter Composition Mode.

You will now be looking at nothing but your text. (When first
entering composition mode, you’ll see a message about typewriter
scrolling—if you would like to learn more about that feature, see
the “Typewriter Scrolling” bookmark in the inspector.)

Here’s what you need to know about composition mode:

• When you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, a

control bar appears. This allows you to change the text
zoom, the position and width of the virtual paper, and fade
the background in and out. It also has buttons to bring up
the keywords panel and inspector.

⁃ Tip: Holding down the Option key while the control

bar is visible changes the “Paper Width” slider to
“Paper Height”.

• You can customise the look of composition mode in the

“Appearance” pane of the Preferences. By default, the
regular text colour is overridden to appear as white on a
dark grey-blue background, but you can change this to use
black-on-white, green-on-black or anything you want.

• You can set a background image for composition mode via

Project > Project Settings…

• Switch documents in composition mode by going to Navigate

> Go To in the main menu, or by using the “Go To” button in
the control bar. (Also, the keyboard shortcuts Opt-Cmd-Up
and Opt-Cmd-Down navigate to the previous and next
document in the binder, and Cmd-[ and Cmd-] navigate back

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and forth through the document history.)

• Hit Opt-Cmd-F or Escape to leave composition mode (or use

the button on the right in the control bar).

Okay, let’s leave composition mode now (hit Escape).

Your orientation is now complete! Let’s move on to the

organisation tools. To access the next section, we’re going to do
something a little different—be sure to read all of the instructions
below before following them:

1. Click on the “Get Organised” folder. Upon so doing, this

editor will be replaced by the corkboard—a number of index
cards against a light brown background.

2. Once the corkboard appears, in the toolbar, click on the

corkboard icon (the centre icon in the group of three next to
the search field) to turn it off. Once you’ve done that, the
corkboard in the editor should be replaced with text, and the
control in the toolbar should look like this, with no section
selected:

Off you go!

The document you are reading now is a folder. As mentioned, there’s

no significant difference between text and folder documents. The
differences are as follows:

1. They have different icons: folder icons are blue, and text
document icons are white rectangles.

⁃ Note that the folder icon for this document (“Get

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Organised”) has a little text icon in its corner. This

signifies that this folder contains text—this text. (The text
icon has nothing to do with the folder having text
documents inside it, such as “Splitting the Editor” and so
on—it means that this folder document itself contains
text.)

2. Folder documents always have “disclosure triangles” next to

them in the binder even when they have no subdocuments.

3. By default, folders and text documents open in different view

modes in the editor. As you saw, this folder opened in
corkboard mode before you turned the corkboard off.

We’ll come to this third point shortly—first, though, let’s look at how
you can view more than one document at the same time.

Select “Splitting the Editor” in the binder (you may need to expand
“Get Organised” by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to it). Or
go get a cup of tea and a biscuit and come back here when you’re
ready—I’ll wait!

When working on a long piece of writing, you may want to refer

to research or other parts of the manuscript. In Scrivener, you can
split the main editor into two and have different documents (or the
same document) open in each.

Let’s try that now by going to View > Editor Layout > Split
Horizontally.

Alternatively, click on the button in the right of the editor header

view (the square with the horizontal line through its middle):

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This document is now displayed in two panes.

Note:

• Through the View > Editor Layout menu, you can switch to a
vertical (side-by-side) split or remove the split to return to a
single editor.

• Option-clicking on the split button in the header view

toggles between horizontal and vertical split mode. (Make
sure the editor is split horizontally for this tutorial - the
button splits vertically by default.)

• Clicking on the split button in the header view when there is

a split removes the split, returning to single editor mode.

Now let’s load a different document in one of the editors:

Select any document in the binder, and it will be shown in the

editor that currently has the focus. (You can tell which editor
currently has the focus because when there is a split, the header
bar of the focussed editor turns blue.)

You can also drag a document from the binder to the header view
of the editor in which you wish to view it. Let’s do that now:

1. Make sure that this document, “Splitting the Editor”, is

visible in the bottom pane.

2. Drag “Sunset” from inside the “Research” folder onto the

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header view of the top pane.

You can use the split view to view any two documents in Scrivener
alongside one another, allowing you to refer to a text, PDF, image
or media document in one editor while typing in another.

Try loading different documents into the other editor now.

Remember, you can do this in two ways:

• Drag a document from the binder to the header view of the

other editor.

• Click into the editor you want to use so that its header turns
blue, and then select a document in the binder.

Tip: Double-clicking on the central divider will resize the two

editors so that they are of equal height or width.

Before moving on, let’s close the other editor. Do this by clicking
on the square button next to the up/down arrows in the right of
the header view above this editor. (Clicking this button when there
is already a split tells Scrivener to get rid of the split and remove
the other editor.)

Next, click on “Editor View Modes”.

Scrivener’s editor has four possible modes—four different ways of

viewing your work. Learning how and when to switch between
them will make your Scrivener experience much more productive.
You switch between these modes using the View Mode control in
the toolbar, which looks like this:

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Why are there only three icons if there are four view modes, I hear
you ask? Good question! Here’s why:

• When you are viewing a single document that has no

subdocuments (that is, a document that is not a group or
folder with other documents inside it), there are only three
modes.

• An extra mode (called “scrivenings”) is available for groups.

• When you are viewing a group, the fourth mode is accessed

by turning off the other modes (just as you turned off the
corkboard to see the text associated with “Get Organised”
not long ago).

That’s going to make a lot more sense if we go through the modes!

1. Single Document Mode

In single document mode, the editor shows the content of the
current document. So, if you’re looking at a text document (or
folder), you’ll be looking at its text; for an image document, single
document mode shows the actual image. The editor is in single
document mode right now. In this mode, the view mode control in
the toolbar looks like this:

Note how the leftmost icon shows a single page, and that it’s
selected.

2. Corkboard Mode
In corkboard mode, the editor shows the subdocuments of the

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current document as index cards on a corkboard. Let’s take a look

at how that works right now:

• Select the “Get Organised” folder in the binder, and then

click on the corkboard icon (the middle button) in the view
mode control to select it:

Once you’ve taken a look at the corkboard, return here. See

how the subdocuments of the folder you selected appeared
as index cards?

(You might also note how the icon in the left button changes
to show two pages rather than one page when viewing a
group—we’ll get to that presently.)

• Next (after you’ve read this bit, so you know how to get
back), click the corkboard icon again, but this time while
viewing the document you are reading right now. You will
see that the corkboard is blank. This is because this
document (“Editor View Modes”) doesn’t contain any
subdocuments—but it could: you could drag documents into
the blank corkboard or add some using the “+” button.

• Click the text icon on the left of the view mode control to see
the text of this document again:

3. Outliner Mode
Like corkboard mode, outliner mode shows the subdocuments of

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the current document, but it presents them as rows with various

columns of information. Try repeating everything you did for the
corkboard mode above, but this time, instead of selecting the
corkboard icon, click the outliner icon on the right (and remember
to come back here afterwards):

4. Scrivenings Mode
“Scrivenings” is the term for Scrivener’s combined text mode, and
it is one of Scrivener’s coolest features. It allows you to view or
edit multiple text documents as though they were a single
document. Scrivenings mode is available in the following
circumstances:

1. When a group is selected in the binder (a folder or any

document containing subdocuments).

2. When more than one document is selected in the binder.

(You can select multiple documents by holding down the
Shift or Command keys.)

If you look at the view mode control in the toolbar at the moment,
you will see that the left-most icon shows a single sheet of paper.
This indicates that scrivenings mode is not available here, because
you are viewing a single document that has no subdocuments. So,
let’s look at one that does.

After reading this next part so that you know what to do, once
more click on “Get Organised” in the binder. You will notice that
the “View Mode” icon in the toolbar changes. (If you have set the
toolbar to show text as well as icons, you will notice that it gets

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renamed, too, becoming “Group Mode” instead of “View Mode”.)

The single text icon on the left has now changed into two pieces of
paper, representing a stack. This shows that it is possible to enter
Scrivenings mode.

Let’s try that now: after clicking on “Get Organised” in the binder:

1. Click on the scrivenings group mode icon (the two pieces of

paper).

2. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the editor, glancing
at the text it contains.

3. Return here either by clicking on “Editor View Modes” in the

binder or by hitting the back button.

Done that? You should have seen that the text from all the various
subdocuments of the “Get Organised” folder—including this one
—were presented as a single, continuous document, with dividers
marking the boundaries between them. You can edit text in
Scrivenings mode just as you can when text documents are viewed
in isolation.

Note: When you selected the “Get Organised” folder again, it

opened in outliner mode because Scrivener remembers which
mode you last used to view a group. Whenever you change the
group mode, the new mode will automatically be used for
groups until you change it again.

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View Modes and Selections

You’ve now switched between all the main view modes. The main
thing to remember is that the view modes available depend on
what has been loaded into the editor from the binder:

• When one document with no subdocuments is loaded into the

editor, there are three view modes available:

⁃ Single document mode (view the document content,

such as its text).

⁃ Corkboard mode.

⁃ Outliner mode.

• When a folder or a document with subdocuments is loaded into

the editor, there are four view modes:

⁃ Scrivenings mode.

⁃ Corkboard mode.

⁃ Outliner mode.

⁃ Single document mode. In this case, you access single

document mode by turning off the other view modes—
that is, by clicking on the selected button in the view
mode control to deselect it.

• When multiple documents are selected in the binder (by Shift-

or Command-clicking on them), there are three view modes
available:

⁃ Scrivenings mode. (In this case, single document mode

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is not available because the editor is not displaying a

single document.)

⁃ Corkboard mode.

⁃ Outliner mode.

Tip: You can also switch between view modes using the top three
items in the View menu, or using the Cmd-1, Cmd-2 and Cmd-3
keyboard shortcuts.

I know, I know—now you really do need that cup of tea, and

probably another biscuit too. Once you’re done, now that you
know how to switch between view modes, let’s take a closer look
at them. Click on “The Corkboard” when you’re ready.

The corkboard shows the immediate subdocuments of the selected

document. To see this in action:

1. Split the editor again by going to View > Editor Layout > Split
Horizontally (or using the button in the editor header view).

2. Click into the top editor so that its header view becomes blue
(to indicate that it has the focus).

3. Click on the “Draft” folder in the binder to load it in the top

editor.

4. Make sure the corkboard is selected in the view mode

control in the toolbar.

Note how the corkboard in the top editor now shows the three
folders, “The Basics”, “Going Further” and “Tips”, represented as
index cards. If you look in the binder, you will notice that these

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three folders are the immediate subdocuments of the Draft folder

—that is, they are only indented one level deeper than the Draft
folder.

Note: Index cards on the corkboard show the title and synopsis of
each document. If a document does not have a synopsis
associated with it, the first lines of its text will be displayed in
grey instead.

Next, in the corkboard, double-click on the yellow book icon in the

second card. This will drill down to show the contents of the
“Going Further” folder on the corkboard.

You can edit the synopsis or title in a card by double-clicking into

it, and you can drag the cards around (and into the binder) to
reorder your documents. (If you try this out in the tutorial, be sure
to put them back into their original order afterwards!)

Now click on the “Research” folder in the binder. Note how media
files such as images are displayed as photographs on the
corkboard rather than as index cards (although you can change
this behaviour via the Preferences).

Tip: If the inspector is open, it will show information for the

currently selected document in the corkboard (or outliner). If
nothing is selected, information will be shown for the container
document.

Corkboard Options
You can change settings such as the number of cards in a row and
their width by clicking on the button showing an icon of four
index cards in the right of the footer bar:

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• Other view options are available from the View > Corkboard
Options menu.

• Show status stamps on cards (diagonal stamps indicating the

status of each document) by going to View > Corkboard
Options > Show Status Stamps.

• Tint cards with label colours by going to View > Use Label
Color In > Index Cards.

• Ctrl-clicking on selected cards brings up a contextual menu,

allowing you to change the label and status of the
documents associated with those cards.

There’s a whole lot more you can do with the corkboard, so once
you feel at home in Scrivener, be sure to come back and check out
the corkboard section in “Going Further” (or have a look at the full
user manual available from the Help menu).

For now, though (after a stretch of the legs, a glass of wine, a good
curse at the prolixity of this tutorial’s author, whichever helps),
let’s move on to the outliner. To do so, make sure the focus is in the

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bottom editor (by clicking into it if necessary), and then select “The
Outliner” in the binder.

The outliner allows you to see sections of the binder in more detail.
It works like the binder, showing an indented list of documents
that can be expanded and collapsed, but, unlike the binder, it can
show synopses and other information—as the name suggests, it’s a
great way of working with an outline of your manuscript. Let’s
take a look at it:

1. Click into the upper editor pane (which should still show the
corkboard) so that it receives the focus (its header bar
turning blue), and then click on the “Draft” folder in the
binder.

2. Select the “Outliner” segment of the view mode control in

the toolbar.

The upper editor now shows an outline of all items contained

inside the Draft folder (because that is what we selected in the
binder). Click on a disclosure triangle next to one of the folders to
reveal more documents (or Opt-click on a disclosure triangle to
open all subfolders inside the folder).

Using the Outliner

• The “Title and Synopsis” column shows (surprise, surprise)
the title and synopsis of each document.

⁃ Double-click into a title or synopsis to edit it.

• If a document has no title and no synopsis, the first lines of

its text will be displayed. If there is no text, “Untitled”

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placeholder text will be shown.

⁃ Double-click into the placeholder to add a title.

⁃ Hit return to add a synopsis after you have typed the

title.

⁃ If you only want a synopsis and no title, hit return as

soon as you double-click into the row, to leave the title
area blank.

• If a document has a title but no synopsis, only the title will

be shown.

⁃ In this case, to add a synopsis, double-click the title to

edit and hit return at the end of the title to start typing
a synopsis.

• If a document has a synopsis but no title, only the synopsis

will be shown.

⁃ In this case, when you double-click into the synopsis to

edit it, a blank title line will appear above the synopsis
so that you can add a title if you wish. When you finish
editing, if you didn’t add a title, the title line will
disappear again.

• You can drag, drop and remove documents just as you can in
the binder.

• You can move items around using the keyboard shortcuts

found in the Edit > Move menu.

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Tip: The button on the right of the outliner footer bar (showing
an icon of three dots and lines) allows you to show and hide
synopses.

Outliner Options
• Determine which columns are shown by clicking on the “>”
button in the top-right of the outliner title bar, or via the View
> Outliner Options menu. The outliner can show as much or as
little information as you want.

• Outliner columns can be sorted by clicking on the column

headers:

⁃ Click once to sort in ascending order.

⁃ Click again to sort in descending order.

⁃ Click a third time to remove the sort.

Right, on to scrivenings mode—make sure the focus is in the

bottom editor again (by clicking into it if necessary) and then select
“Scrivenings” in the binder.

The whole point of Scrivener is to make working on a long text

easier by allowing you to break it up into smaller pieces.
Sometimes, however, you will want to see how those smaller
pieces fit into the greater whole. This is where “Scrivenings” mode

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comes in.

There are two ways of entering Scrivenings mode:

1. Select a folder or group in the binder that contains text

subdocuments and use Scrivenings mode to view all of the
documents inside the folder as though they were a single
text document. (Note that the text of the folder itself is also
included at the top.)

2. Select multiple documents in the binder and use Scrivenings

mode to view them as though they were a single document.

We already tried (1) when we were looking at “Editor View

Modes”, so let’s try viewing multiple documents this time:

1. Click into the outliner in the top editor so that the top editor
gets the focus (its header bar turning blue again).

2. Click on “START HERE” at the top of the binder.

3. With the Command key on the keyboard held down, click on

“Editor View Modes” and “Scrivenings”, so that all three
documents get selected.

4. Click on the Scrivenings mode icon in the view mode control

in the toolbar (the leftmost icon in the control, showing the
two pieces of paper). All three documents will now be
loaded into the editor as a single text.

5. Click the scrivenings contents button that appears in the

right of the header bar:

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6. Select “Scrivenings” from the list that appears—the text will

scroll down to this document.

7. Type something in the following line:

Type something here!

Take a look in the bottom editor—you’ll see the edits you made in
scrivenings mode are reflected there, too.

Note: In Scrivenings mode, the inspector displays information

about the section of text you are currently editing.

So that you can see where one document ends and the next begins,
there is a dashed, horizontal dividing line between sections, but if
you prefer you can also display the document titles above each
section by selecting View > Text Editing > Show Titles in Scrivenings
from the menu.

Tip: You cannot make textual edits across document boundaries.

You can change formatting across boundaries though.

So, if you were writing a novel, you could write each scene of a
chapter in isolation and then view and edit the whole chapter by
selecting the chapter folder and entering Scrivenings mode.

We can get rid of the split now. To do so, click on the button in the
right of the header bar for this editor:

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That’s it for “Get Organised”—if you’re still with me, then by now
you know almost everything you need to be productive with
Scrivener. Next we’ll look at how you get your work out of
Scrivener. Ensure the “Get It Out There” folder is expanded and
then select “Section Types” in the binder.

Scrivener is designed to be flexible, allowing you to organise your

writing however you want. You grow your manuscript in the Draft
folder in sections as small or large as you like, using whatever
structure you feel works best. When you are ready to get your
manuscript out there for other people to read, you “compile” the
contents of the Draft folder into a single exported or printed
document.

Before we get to the Compile feature, however, we are presented

with a problem: given that you can arrange your manuscript
however you want, how can Scrivener know what each section is
supposed to be, or how it should be formatted or arranged in the
final manuscript? How can it know the difference between a title
page and an introduction?

Or, suppose you decide to break up a novel by using a folder for

each chapter, with text documents inside those folders each
representing a scene. How does Scrivener know that your folders
represent chapters and your text documents represent scenes?

The answer is that you tell Scrivener what each piece is using
Section Types.

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In the previous examples, you would:

1. Create section types in your project for “Title Page”,

“Introduction”, “Chapter” and “Scene”.

2. Ensure each document has the appropriate section type

applied.

3. When compiling, tell Scrivener how to format each section

type (we’ll cover that in the next section).

Let’s see how section types work in practice:

1. Ensure the inspector is open and select the Metadata pane

(the third button in the header bar, the one with the tag icon).

2. Under “General Metadata”, you will see a “Section type”

pop-up menu.

3. Clicking on it, you will find the following options:

⁃ Structure-based: Tells Scrivener that the current

document should use the default section type based on
its indentation in the binder (we’ll look at this in a
moment).

⁃ Project-specific types: “Heading” and “Text” are the only

two section types specifically set up for this project—
we’ll edit them in a moment.

⁃ Edit: brings up the Project Settings panel so that we can

edit the section types.

Note that this document’s section type is displayed as “Text” in

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grey italics. The grey italics indicate that this document is using
the “Structure-based” setting, and that the default section type for
the current document is “Text”. If we wanted, we could change it
explicitly to “Heading” or “Text” using the pop-up menu.

Defining Section Types

The above is all a little abstract. It will make much more sense if
we think about this in terms of the current binder and set up some
custom section types ourselves. Take a look at the contents of the
Draft folder in the binder:

• The three folders at the top level of the Draft folder are “The
Basics”, “Going Further” and “Tips”—the three folders that
use custom yellow icons (by “top level”, I mean the ones that
are indented the least). The way I’ve organised this tutorial,
each of these folders represents a major part of the Draft.

• The blue folders inside the three top-level folders—folders

such as “Get Oriented”, “Get Organised” and so on—are
essentially chapters.

• The text documents inside the blue folders each represent a

different section inside a chapter.

So, the way I have organised the Draft for this tutorial is by parts,
chapters and sections. Let’s set up the section types of this project
to reflect that.

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Tip: You can open these instructions in a separate window so that

you can read them while the Project Settings panel is open by
clicking on the yellow pencil button in the toolbar. This opens a
“Quick Reference” window which you can place alongside the
main project window. If there isn’t room on your screen for both
windows, go to Window > Float Quick Reference Panels. This
will ensure the Quick Reference window floats over the top of
the main project window.

1. In the main menu, go to Project > Project Settings… and make

sure “Section Types” is selected in the list on the left of the
window that appears.

2. In the “Section Types” tab, double-click into “Heading” and

change its title to “Part”.

3. Do the same for “Text”, renaming it to “Chapter”.

4. Click the “+” button to add a third section type and name it
“Section”. (Note that you can drag and drop section types in
this list to reorder them, but we’ll leave this order as-is.)

5. Click “OK”.

Now click on the section type pop-up menu in the inspector again.
You’ll see that where before there were options for “Heading” and
“Text”, there are now options for “Part”, “Chapter” and “Section”,
which makes much more sense for our project.

Defining Default Section Types by Structure

There’s a problem, however: this document is shown as being a
“Chapter” rather than a “Section”. One way we could fix this

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would be to override the setting manually. Try that now:

1. Click on the section type pop-up menu in the inspector.

2. Change the setting to “Section”.

Great! Except… It’s going to be a pain to change that setting for

every single text document in the binder. Fortunately, we don’t
have to. Let’s change it back again:

1. Once more, click on the section type pop-up.

2. Change the setting to “Structure-Based”. (It will change back

to “Chapter” in italicised text.)

“Structure-Based” means: Use a default section type based on the

indentation of this document in the binder. But how does Scrivener
pick a section type based on indentation? That’s something you
teach it in the Project Settings again:

1. Open the Project Settings from the main menu again.

2. This time, select the “Default Types by Structure” tab at the

top. As soon as you do, you’ll notice that many folders in the
binder are highlighted yellow.

3. Try clicking on the three rows—“All folders”, “All file

groups” and “All files”. As you do so, different documents
will be highlighted yellow in the binder.

The yellow highlights show which documents are affected by the

selected setting. So, when you select “All folders”, all folders are
highlighted yellow, for instance. Now let’s change the default

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settings:

1. Leave “All folders” as it is for now (so that the “Section

Type” is set to “Part”).

2. Change the section type for “All file groups” to “Section”. (A

file group is a text document containing other text
documents.)

3. Change the section type for “All files” to “Section”.

4. Click “OK”.

We just told Scrivener that all folders are parts and all text
documents are sections. If you look over in the inspector again,
you’ll see that the section type for this document now correctly
reads “Section”. If you click on any other text document, you’ll
also see the section type set as “Section”. If you click on a folder,
such as “The Basics” or “Get Oriented”, you’ll see the section type
set as “Part”.

But wait, we don’t want all folders to be parts—only the top-level

folders in the Draft (the ones using custom yellow icons) should be
parts. The folders inside them (one level deeper) should be
chapters. Let’s fix that:

1. Open Project Settings again.

2. Click on “All folders” to select it.

3. Click the “+” button (the one with two lines next to it).

4. Note how “All folders” changes to “Root folders” and

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another row is added entitled “Level 1 folders and deeper”.

5. Click the “+” button again.

6. A “Level 2 folders and deeper” row will be added.

7. Try selecting the different folder settings—“Root folders”,

“Level 1 folders” and “Level 2 folders and deeper”—and
take notice of what gets highlighted in the binder. You’ll see
that the Draft folder is a “root folder”, the yellow folders are
at “level 1”, and the folders using regular blue icons are at
“level 2”.

8. Change the section type for “Level 2 folders and deeper” to

“Chapter”.

9. Click “OK”.

Now try clicking on “The Basics” and “Get Oriented” in the binder
again, taking note of the section type for each in the inspector,
before returning here. Scrivener now knows how our binder is
structured, and what each level represents. This means that, from
now on, we’ll only need to change the section type in the inspector
for the occasional document that we want to be different.

Note: When you create a new project based on one of the

templates, such as the novel templates, the section types are all
set up for you (although you now know how to edit them should
you so wish).

These section types are going to come in handy when we compile

the Draft, which is what we’ll move on to now…

We’ve seen that one of the key concepts of Scrivener is that you

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work on your manuscript in pieces, but this wouldn’t be much use

if you couldn’t put Humpty together again. That’s where Compile
comes in: you write your manuscript in the Draft folder, and when
you’re ready to share it with the world, you “compile” it into a
single file. Compiling doesn’t affect the original documents inside
Scrivener—they all stay as they were in the Draft folder—it simply
copies them into a combined text in the form of an e-book, a PDF
file, a Word file, a print-out, or whatever format you choose.

Note: This section covers compiling your documents into a single

file for export or print. You can also export or print individual
documents separately using File > Print Current Document… or File
> Export > Files…

Let’s try compiling the tutorial:

1. From the main menu, select File > Compile…

2. Make sure “Default” is selected under “Formats” on the left

and “Print” is selected next to “Compile for” at the top.

3. Click “Compile”.

4. In the print panel that appears, click on the “PDF” button in

the lower-left and select Open PDF in Preview.

A PDF document will open in Preview. Scroll through it, and you
will see that it contains everything you have read so far and more
—everything in the Draft folder compiled into a single text.

Using Compile Formats

In the PDF we just produced, the text looks exactly the same as it
does in Scrivener’s editor. What if you need to generate a

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manuscript using standard formatting (e.g. Courier 12-point) to

send to your editor, though? Or what if you want to create a
paperback for self-publishing?

With traditional word processors, you would need to go through

and reformat your entire manuscript for every format you wanted
to create—changing the font and paragraph settings and so on. In
Scrivener, there’s no need for any of that. You write using
whatever font and format you like looking at on the screen, and
then you tell Compile to change the formatting in the final
document. You do this by choosing a Compile Format from the list
on the left of the Compile panel.

Let’s compile the tutorial into standard manuscript format, then:

1. Go to File > Compile… again.

2. This time, select “Manuscript (Courier)” in the “Formats”

list.

3. Click “Compile” and again choose to open the PDF in

Preview.

Huh. Other than a header at the top of the page, that doesn’t look
any different from before—why?

Remember how in the last section we looked at “section types”?

We told Scrivener what all the different parts of our Draft folder
were (in the case of this tutorial, parts, chapters and sections).
Well, now we have to tell Scrivener how to lay out each of those
section types.

• Each Compile format consists of a number of “section

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layouts”.

• Each section layout defines a number of settings that can be

applied to a document in the Draft, such as whether the font
face and size should be changed, whether there should be a
page break before it, and so on.

• You apply a section layout to each section type in your

project to tell Scrivener how to format your manuscript.

Let’s tell Scrivener how to format the parts, chapters and sections
in our tutorial:

Tip: You can open these instructions in a separate window so that

you can read them while the Compile panel is open by clicking
on the yellow pencil button in the toolbar. This opens a “Quick
Reference” window which you can place alongside the main
project window. If there isn’t room on your screen for both
windows, go to Window > Float Quick Reference Panels. This
will ensure the Quick Reference window floats over the top of
the main project window.

1. Open Compile again. (Note that “Manuscript (Courier)” will

still be selected.)

2. Click on “Assign Section Layouts” at the bottom of the

central “Section Layouts” area.

⁃ A window will appear. On the left is a list of the section

types defined in the project (“Part”, “Chapter” and
“Section”); on the right is a list of section layouts
defined in the current Compile format, along with a
preview of how each section layout will make your

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text look.

3. Select “Part” in the list on the left.

4. Select the “Part Title” section layout on the right.

⁃ You have just told Scrivener that, when using the

“Manuscript (Courier)” Compile format, documents or
folders in this project that have the “Part” section type
applied should use the “Part Title” section layout
during Compile.

5. Select “Chapter” on the left.

6. Select the “Chapter Title” section layout on the right.

7. Select “Section” on the left.

8. Select “Section Text” on the right.

9. Click “OK”.

10. Click “Compile”, and again open the results in Preview.

You will now see that the font and formatting throughout the
document has been altered—it now uses Courier 12-point and
parts and chapters start on a new page with a title at the top.

Choose different Compile formats to apply different formatting—

for instance, the “Paperback (5.08” x 7.81”)” format will create a
manuscript suitable for submitting to CreateSpace.

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Note: You can compile to many different file formats (e.g. Word,
e-book) by changing the “Compile for” setting at the top of the
Compile panel. Which Compile formats are available will
depend on the file format selected.

Compile Settings
• On the right of the Compile panel is a list of the documents
that will be compiled. Here you can un-tick any documents
you don’t want included and change the section types.

• Other options are available by clicking on the buttons in the

header bar above the contents list. The options available vary
according to the selected file format.

• At the bottom of the contents list are options for adding front
and back matter. Here you can select a folder contained
outside of the Draft folder, the contents of which will be
added either to the front or back of the manuscript. These
settings are saved per-Compile format, so that you can have
different front and back matter for different formats.

⁃ The lock button next to these options locks the front or

back matter folder to the current file format (as selected
next to “Compile for”). You won’t normally need to
use this, unless you want different front and back
matter settings for different file formats when using the
same Compile format. (For instance, you might want
different front matter for the ePub and Kindle versions
of your e-book when using the “E-book” Compile
format.)

• You can override the font used throughout by using the

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“Font” pop-up menu at the top of the “Section Layouts”

area.

Tip: If you hold down the Option key on your keyboard, the
“Compile” button in the Compile panel changes to “Save”,
allowing you to save the settings without compiling.

Creating Your Own Compile Formats

Scrivener comes with a number of Compile formats built-in. If
they don’t provide what you need, you can create your own, as
follows:

1. Click on the “+” button below the Formats list.

2. If you want to create a new format from scratch, select “New

Format…”.

3. If you want to base your new format on an existing one,

select “Duplicate & Edit Format…”.

At this point, the entire window changes to present you with a

wealth of options. Here you can name the format, choose where to
save it, create your own section layouts, determine the size of the
printed page, set up page headers and footers, override styles, and
much, much more. You have complete control over how your
work will look when compiled.

The gear button above the list on the left allows you to set the file
formats that will work with your Compile format. The “Test…”
button allows you to test your settings.

We won’t go into all the details of creating your own Compile

format here—the chances are that you will never need to create

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your own format and will only use the formats built into Scrivener.
For now, it’s only important to know that you can create your own
formats if you ever need to. Refer to the user manual (available
from the Help menu) if you ever decide to get your fingers dirty (or
just experiment—you can’t break anything!).

Okay, we’re about done. Select “Creating a New Project” under

“Get Going” (expanding the latter if necessary).

Phew! We’ve now covered all major features of Scrivener. If you

haven’t done so already, then soon you are going to want to create
your own project and get writing. Generally you will want to
create a separate Scrivener project for each writing project.

To create a new project:

1. Select New Project… from the File menu. This will open the
project templates chooser panel.

2. Choose a project template from one of the categories (e.g.

novel, screenplay, thesis).

3. Click “Choose…” to specify a location at which to save the

project.

Note: Scrivener projects are saved onto your hard drive with the
file extension “.scriv” (in the same way that Word documents are
saved with the file extension “.docx”). When you create a new
project, make sure you know where you are saving it, so that you
can locate it in the Finder. If you ever move to another computer,
you’ll want to make sure that you back up and copy your .scriv
projects to your new computer.

Before you create your own project though, click on “All Set” in

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the binder, and let’s wrap up this tutorial!

One last thing to note before I leave you to it: Scrivener auto-saves
your work so you don’t have to worry about saving manually.
Every time you make an edit to the project, Scrivener schedules a
save, which will occur after a couple of seconds of inactivity. You
can, however, force a save at any time by selecting File > Save (Cmd-
S).

And that’s it: you are now all set to start using Scrivener. If you
want to go into more depth or explore a little more, look at the
“Going Further” section. I recommend leaving that until after
you’ve been using Scrivener a little, though (or just look through
the topics and read any documents that catch your eye).
Alternatively, take a look through the user manual (Help > Scrivener
Manual).

Experiment! You should be able to work out most things by

playing with the program. If you have any problems, check out
our knowledge base, or take a look at some of our tutorial videos
on our web page:

http://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/videos.php

And of course, if you are still baffled, post a question on the user
forums:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum

Likewise, if you encounter any bugs or glitches, no matter how

small—and especially if you experience a crash—please post to the

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forums or e-mail us at [email protected].

I hope you enjoy using Scrivener and find it a useful tool, and offer
my heartfelt thanks to you for choosing Scrivener (or considering
it) as the tool for your own writing.

The Page is Yours

You are now ready to begin your own project—go to File > New
Project to get going. Happy writing!

Remember that you don’t need to read anything in this section to

start using Scrivener—”The Basics” will get you up and running with
everything you need to know. Just dip into this section whenever you
feel like learning something else that you can do in Scrivener.

There are several ways of searching in Scrivener. Most commonly,

you’ll use the following searching methods:

• When you want to open a particular document and you know

its title or some text that appears in its synopsis, use the toolbar
search field.

• When you want to search through your entire project for a

phrase or word, use Project Search (the magnifying glass in the
toolbar). The binder will be replaced with a list of search results.

⁃ Select a search result to open it in the editor. Matching

phrases or words will be highlighted.

⁃ To quickly go through the matching phrases, click into the

editor and hit Cmd-F to bring up the Find panel. This will
automatically be populated with the current search term.
You can then use this to jump through results in the text

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without having to scroll through looking for highlights.

• To search for a phrase or word in a single document, use the

Find panel (Cmd-F or Edit > Find > Find…).

The different search fields are briefly described below.

Toolbar Quick Search Field

The toolbar Quick Search field works like the search field-cum-
address bar in Safari, in that as you type, it brings up a list of results
in a menu beneath it. Clicking on a result opens it in the editor. This
searches document titles, synopses and text, showing the top 10
results for each.

Toolbar Magnifying Glass Button

The magnifying glass button in the toolbar provides quick access to a
number of search tools. Click on the magnifying glass to bring up the
Project Search field. Or, click on the arrow next to it to bring up a
menu of other search tools.

Project Search
Project search is the most comprehensive way of searching for
something in the project. It allows you to search for documents
containing a particular word, phrase, label, keyword and more. We
already covered how to use this in the section on “The Binder” when
learning “The Basics”. Here are some extra tips:

1. Along with the magnifying glass button in the toolbar, you can
also access this from the menu via Edit > Find > Search in Project

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(Shift-Cmd-F).

2. Clicking on the magnifying glass in the left of the search field

that appears when using Project Search brings up a menu
containing various options. For instance, here you can choose to
search only for keywords, or only for a particular label.

3. Holding down Option or Command on the keyboard while

clicking on an option in the “Search In” section of the menu
allows you to choose more than one option. By doing this you
could, for example, search in both synopses and notes but
nowhere else.

To close the search results, click on the “X” in the search results
header bar:

To hide the search bar, click on the magnifying glass in the toolbar
again.

Finding Text in a Document

To find text inside a document, use the Find panel, which is available
from the Edit > Find > Find… (Cmd-F) or by clicking on the arrow next
to the magnifying glass in the toolbar and choosing “Search in

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Document”.

Other Find Tools

Other find tools can be found in the Edit > Find menu, such as Find by
Formatting, which allows you to search the text for particular
formatting (e.g. italics).

Filtering the Outliner and Corkboard

When the focus is in the outliner or corkboard, going to Edit > Find >
Find… (Cmd-F) will bring up a filter bar at the top of the editor. You
can use this to search for items inside the outliner or corkboard. As
you type in the search field or change the filter options, the outliner
or corkboard will update to show only the documents that meet the
given criteria. Note:

• Click the disclosure triangle next to the search field to reveal the
options.

• Click “Done” to remove the filter.

As well as being able to split the editor to view more than one
document, you can open documents in their own windows,
allowing you to have as many documents in a project open on
screen as you want. We call these windows “Quick Reference”
panels, because you can use them to open, check and edit
documents without affecting the main window.

Let’s start by opening this document in a Quick Reference panel so

that we can keep it open while we open some others:

1. Click the “Quick Ref” icon in the toolbar (the one with the

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yellow pencil in it).

2. Resize the window that appears as you wish, so that you can
still see the main window behind it.

You should now be reading this document inside the Quick

Reference panel. You can change the label and status associated
with a document using the pop-up buttons in the footer bar of the
Quick Reference panel. You can also view the synopsis, notes and
other metadata associated with the document using the pop-up
button in the top-right of the window.

Next, in the main menu, select Window > Float Quick Reference
Panels. This makes it so that Quick Reference panels never
disappear behind the main window. Now let’s look at some other
ways of opening Quick Reference panels.

Space Bar
1. Click on “Sunset” in the “Research” folder of the binder.

2. Hit the space bar on the keyboard.

You should now have a second Quick Reference panel open, this
one with an image in it.

Menu
Go to Navigate > Open Quick Reference > Research > spacewalk_info.

You should now have a PDF file open in a separate window too.

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Opening Multiple Panels at Once

Close all of Quick Reference panels you just opened. Once you’ve
done that:

1. Holding down Command or Shift on the keyboard, select

“Sunset” and “spacewalk_info” in the binder.

2. Drag both documents and drop them onto the “Quick

Ref” (yellow pencil) button in the toolbar.

Both documents will reopen in Quick Reference windows.

Dragging documents onto the toolbar icon allows you to open
multiple items in Quick Reference panels at once.

Bookmarks
Clicking the bookmark icon in the left of the Quick Reference
footer bar opens the project bookmarks in a sidebar. Clicking on
documents in this sidebar opens them in the Quick Reference
editor on the right of the panel.

You can therefore use Quick Reference panels as a way of

referencing your project bookmarks in their own window.

In “The Basics”, we saw that you can split Scrivener’s editor in

two to view two documents alongside one another. However, each
of the two editors also has a “Copyholder” associated with it.

A Copyholder is a secondary editor that can be displayed inside an

editor so that you can refer to another document. It is not a full
editor in itself, in that it cannot display the corkboard, outliner or
scrivenings modes; it can only show the content of a single

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document.

With two editors open each showing their Copyholders, you can
view up to four documents in the main window at the same time.

Copyholders are opened by dragging a document to an editor

header bar with the Option key held down, so let’s try that now:

1. Split the editor vertically (View > Editor Layout > Split
Vertically).

2. Open another document in the right editor, e.g. by dragging

any document from the binder to its header bar, or by
clicking into the other editor and selecting another document
in the binder.

3. Now pick another document and drag it to the right editor’s

header bar, holding down Option on the keyboard when you
drop it into the header. (Note that it’s best not to hold down
Option until you drop; if you hold down Option when you
start dragging, you may change what is shown in the other
editor.)

The right editor will now be split in two, meaning there are now
three documents being shown in the main window. Note how the
Copyholder is not as detailed as the main editor—its header bar is
narrow and it has no footer bar.

Tip: Ctrl-click on the Copyholder header bar to bring up a

contextual menu that allows you to change the placement of the
Copyholder.

To close a Copyholder, click on the “X” in the right of its header

bar. Alternatively, click on the button left of the “X” to close the

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Copyholder and simultaneously open its document in a Quick

Reference panel.

Styles allow you to save and apply formatting to text. For example,
you could create a “Block Quote” style with an indent and a
smaller font than the rest of the text (Scrivener in fact provides a
“Block Quote” style by default).

Scrivener remembers the style associated with a section of text.

This way, if you change the formatting of a style, Scrivener can
update all text that uses that style to use the new formatting.

Applying Styles
To apply a style, do one of the following:

• Select a style from the styles menu in the format bar—the

styles menu is indicated by a pilcrow (¶) and an “a”.

• Ctrl-click on the text and choose the style from the contextual
menu that appears.

• Go to Format > Style in the main menu and choose a style.

• Go to Format > Style > Show Styles Panel and choose a style
from the panel that appears.

There are two types of style:

1. Paragraph Styles get applied to whole paragraphs, and

include paragraph formatting such as line spacing and
indents. They can optionally include character formatting
such as italics and bold, and can also optionally affect the

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font family and size.

⁃ Paragraph styles are indicated in menus by a pilcrow

icon.

⁃ Paragraph styles that also include character formatting

are indicated by a pilcrow icon and an “a”.

2. Character Styles get applied only to the selected text or

current word (if there is no selection). They only include
character formatting such as italics and bold (and optionally
the font family and size). They do not include paragraph
formatting such as line spacing and indents.

⁃ Character styles are indicated in menus by an “a”.

Tip: For body text, it’s generally best to use “No Style”. In
Scrivener, unlike in many word processors, you should apply
styles only to text that you want formatted differently from
everything else. If you use styles for everything, even the main
body text, then you will make it harder for Compile to override
your formatting for different output requirements.

Creating Styles
To create a new style:

1. Create some text in the editor that uses the formatting you
want to save as a style.

2. Select some of the text.

3. Go to Format > Style > New Style From Selection. A panel will

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appear.

4. Enter the name of the style.

5. Choose the style type:

⁃ Save character attributes creates a character style.

⁃ Save paragraph style creates a paragraph style that

does not include character formatting.

⁃ Save all formatting creates a paragraph style that

includes character formatting.

6. Choose whether to include the font family and size.

7. Check the other options.

8. Click “OK”.

The style you created is now available for use in the style menus.

Redefining Styles
Sometimes you will want to tweak a style—maybe you realise you
want your block quotes indented further, for instance. To do so,
follow all the same steps as for creating styles above, except that
instead of choosing New Style From Selection from the Style menu,
choose Redefine Style From Selection.

Once again, go through the various options and click “OK”. (Note
that when redefining a style, you cannot change a paragraph style
to a character style or vice versa.) Upon hitting “OK”, a progress
bar will appear while Scrivener goes through the entire project

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looking for text that uses this style, updating any found to use the
redefined formatting.

Compiling Styles
Compile formats can be set up to override styles to use different
formatting. Many of the Compile formats that are provided with
Scrivener (such as “Manuscript (Times)” and “Paperback”) are set
up to override the default styles such as “Block Quote”, “Body”,
“Caption”, “Heading 1” and so on. You can create your own
Compile formats that override styles, too.

You can switch to page layout view to view your text on virtual
pages in one of the following ways:

• Click on the “View” toolbar item and select “Show Page

View”.

• Go to View > Text Editing > Show Page View in the main menu.

Note that the pages you see on screen may not match what you see
when the text is compiled for print or export. The concept of pages
is largely meaningless in Scrivener, because you work on the
different parts of your manuscript in smaller pieces and can
completely change the formatting and insert other elements, such
as titles, during the Compile process. The final arrangement of the
pages isn’t known until the text is compiled into one document.

Thus, unlike traditional word processors where the page layout

view shows exactly what you will see when you print your

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document, in Scrivener it is just another way of viewing your text,

for writers who just feel more comfortable seeing pages fill up on
the screen.

Revision mode allows you to use a different text colour while

editing or revising your text, without having to change the colour
again every time you click into a different part of a document.

• To enter revision mode, select one of the colours (“First

Revision”, “Second Revision” and so on) from the Format >
Revision Mode menu.

• You can set your preferred revision colours in the “Editing”

pane of the Preferences).

• In revision mode, no matter where you click in the text,

when you start typing the text will appear in the chosen
revision colour.

Document links work much like web hyperlinks, except that they
link to other documents in the project.

To create a document link:

1. Select the text to which you wish to apply the text. For
instance, try highlighting “document link” in the next
sentence:

⁃ This is a document link.

⁃ (You don’t have to select text. If there is no selection,

the title of the linked document will be inserted with

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the link applied to it.)

2. Either:

⁃ Go to Edit > Link to Document and choose the document

you wish to reference; Or:

⁃ Drag a document from the binder onto the selected

text.

3. Let’s try the latter: drag the “Revision Mode” document onto
the text you selected above.

You can also choose New Link… from Edit > Link to Document to
bring up a sheet that allows you to create a new document to
which to link.

Clicking on a document link opens the linked document in the

other editor by default, creating a split if necessary. (Try clicking
on the “split” in the previous sentence to see what I mean).

You can change this behaviour in the “Behaviors” pane of the

Preferences, choosing where you would like links opened.

When covering “The Basics”, we saw how we could add

comments and footnotes to text that are displayed in the inspector.
Another way of adding footnotes and comments is to insert them
inline. The text of inline annotations and footnotes appears right
inside your text (as opposed to inspector comments and footnotes,
the text of which is hidden away in the inspector).

Whether you use inspector or inline footnotes and comments is

entirely up to you (you can even use a mixture of both).

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Inline footnotes and annotations look like this:

This text has a footnote after it.3

To create an inline note:

1. Select the text you wish to turn into a footnote or annotation.

2. Go to Insert > Inline Footnote or Insert > Inline Annotation in the

menu.

You can also choose one of these options with no selection and
then start typing.

You can change the colour of an annotation by clicking into it and

using the Format > Color… panel or the format bar colour button.

When you export your work, ranges of text defined as footnotes

can be turned into end-of-page footnotes, and ranges of text
defined as annotations can be turned into comments or omitted
altogether.

Note: When creating inline footnotes, the grey bubble should start
exactly where you want the footnote marker to appear in the
printed or exported text.

You can set three types of word and character count targets in

3This is a footnote. When the text is compiled, exported or printed,

this footnote will be turned into a “real” footnote (or endnote).

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Scrivener:

1. Draft target: the total number of words, characters or pages

you wish to write in your manuscript.

2. Session target: the number of words or characters you wish

to write during the current writing session.

3. Document target: the number of words or characters you

wish to write in a particular document.

Draft Target
Anything you type in documents inside the Draft folder counts
towards the Draft target. To set it:

1. Go to Project > Show Project Targets.

2. Click into the number after “of” beneath the first progress
bar.

3. Type the target count.

4. Click onto “words” next to the number and choose “words”,

“chars” or “pages”.

Session Target
To set it a session target:

1. Go to Project > Show Project Targets.

2. Click into the number after “of” beneath the second progress

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bar.

3. Type the target count.

4. Click onto “words” next to the number and choose “words”

or “chars”.

5. Click on “Options…”.

6. Click on the “Session Target” tab and go through the options.

⁃ “Reset session count” allows you to choose to have the

session count reset at a particular time every day.

⁃ If “Count text written anywhere in the project” is

ticked, the session count will increase even when
typing in documents outside the Draft folder, that are
not part of your final manuscript.

⁃ You can also choose to have session targets

automatically calculated by setting a deadline date for
the Draft target in the “Draft Target” tab and then
ticking “Automatically calculate from draft deadline”
in the “Session Target” tab. When these options are
selected, you can also tell Scrivener on which days of
the week you write, so that it can adjust the daily
session target accordingly.

7. Click “OK”.

Viewing the Draft and Session Targets

When a Draft or session target is set, a progress bar appears in the
search field in Scrivener’s toolbar. If both a Draft and a session

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target is set, the Draft progress bar will appear at the top of the
search field and the session progress bar will appear at the bottom;
if only one target is set, it will appear at the bottom.

Moving the mouse over the search field shows the current Draft
and session count.

You can also go to Project > Show Project Targets… to view the
targets in the floating panel.

Document Targets
To set a document target:

1. In the footer view of a text document, click on the target icon.

2. Set a target in the panel that appears.

The target button in the footer view will be replaced with a

progress bar showing the current progress for the document. You
can click on the progress bar to edit or remove the target.

Scriptwriting mode is available from Format > Scriptwriting > Script

Mode (Cmd-8).

When in script mode, the footer view will show information on the
various available script elements.

• Select Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode > Screenplay from
the main menu now.

⁃ The word and character count will disappear and you

will see a pop-up menu appear on the right of the
footer view saying “General Text” (this just means that

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the currently selected text isn’t recognised as a part of a

screenplay).

• Click into the text on the line below:

Click into this text.

• Try selecting different elements from the pop-up menu on

the right of the footer view.

The above text is automatically reformatted to the script element

you select each time.

You can switch between script elements using the tab and enter
keys:

• Hitting enter at the end of the line will take you to the next
element.

• Hitting tab at the beginning of the line will toggle between

different elements.

• For some elements, hitting tab at the end of a line will take
you to a different element on the next line from hitting enter.
For other elements, hitting tab might insert characters.

⁃ For example, hitting tab at the end of a dialogue line

will move to a parenthetical line, whereas hitting tab in
a scene heading line will insert a hyphen, ready for you
to type the location.

The footer view updates to show what will happen if you press the
tab or enter keys (which will move you to the next script element).

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Note that scriptwriting mode is saved on a document-by-

document basis, so you can switch between documents that use
script formatting and documents that don’t. Documents using
scriptwriting mode have a yellow icon to distinguish them from
other text documents.

To turn off script mode, us the Script Mode menu item again,
deselecting it.

A number of script formats are provided, such as screenplay, stage

play and comic script formats. You can also create your own via
Format > Scriptwriting > Script Settings…

By default, composition mode uses “typewriter scrolling” (you’ll

be notified of this every time you enter composition mode until
you tick “Do not show again”). With this enabled, newly-typed
text will remain in the vertical centre of the screen so that you
don’t have to crick your neck by looking down all the time.

Typewriter scrolling works like this:

• When you type text in a new document, when there is

enough text so that the line you are typing on would be
lower than the middle of the screen, it is automatically
scrolled up to keep it centred.

• If you edit text elsewhere on the screen, typewriter scrolling

occurs wherever you type. This way, the text doesn’t jump
around unexpectedly every time you fix a typo.

• When you want typewriter scrolling to occur in the middle

of the screen again, hit Cmd-J (Edit > Find > Jump to Selection).

You can turn typewriter scrolling off by going to View > Text Editing

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> Typewriter Scrolling (Ctrl-Cmd-T). Using the same menu command,

you can also turn it on for the editor when not in composition
mode.

To test this feature out, enter composition mode (Opt-Cmd-F) and

type some text inside this document (ensuring typewriter scrolling
is turned on). Do that here, making sure you type enough text so
that it wraps across more than one line:

Your text:

Keep typing so that there is enough text to fill the height of the
screen.

Next, try moving the cursor into some text in the bottom quarter of
the screen and type more than a line of text. You’ll see that the
typing line stays at the same position.

Now, hit Cmd-J and carry on typing, once more making sure that
you type enough text to wrap over another line or two. See how
typing now sticks to the centre of the screen? As the text wraps to
another line, it moves up to keep the line in which you are typing
at the same position.

Tip: You can change the typewriter scrolling position via the
“Editing” pane of the Preferences.

Collections provide a way of keeping different lists of binder

documents around. There are two types of collection:

1. Arbitrary collections. You can add any documents you want

to these and drag and drop to have them in any order.

⁃ Suppose you are reading through your manuscript and

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realise that a number of sections have problems in

them that you are going to need to solve. You could
create a collection called “Problems” and add any
problematic documents to it. You could then open that
collection to work through the problematic documents.

2. Search collections allow you to save a search and re-run it at

any time.

⁃ Suppose you are writing a novel and have used labels

to record the point of view of each chapter. You could
set up different search collections for each point-of-
view character. Each search collection would search for
the character name in the label. You could then look
open one of the collections to see only the chapters or
scenes for a particular character.

Opening Collections
In the toolbar:

• Click on the “View” button on the left.

• Select “Show Collections”.

⁃ An area will appear at the top of the binder containing

two rows (tabs), “Binder” and “Search Results”.

• Click on the “Search Results” row.

See what happened? The last search you ran gets run again, and its
results appear where the binder was.

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Click on the “Binder” tab to return to the binder before continuing.

Arbitrary Collections
To create an arbitrary collection:

• Ctrl-click on the header view to bring up the header bar

menu.

• Select “Lock in Place”:

The header bar will turn pink, indicating that the editor is now
“locked”. When an editor is locked, clicks in the binder will have
no effect. Try clicking on different documents in the binder to see
what I mean—they will no longer get loaded into the editor when
selected as they normally do. We have locked the editor so that
you can still read this document while trying out the following

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steps.

• Hold down the Command key on the keyboard and select

several documents in the binder.

• Once you have selected five or six (it doesn’t matter which),
click on “+” button in the “Collections” bar at the very top of
the binder:

The binder will be replaced by a flat list showing only the

documents you selected. You haven’t moved those documents—
they are all still in their rightful places in the binder. No, you’ve
just created a collection. When you created it, the selected
documents were automatically added to it.

To see what I mean click on one of the documents in the collection

list and go to Navigate > Reveal in Binder. This shows you where the
document is located in the binder.

Click back on the collection tab that was created once you’ve tried
this, to return to the collection.

• You can drag and drop the collection rows into any order
you want.

• You can drag and drop documents inside the collection list to
reorder them. (This has no effect on the order in the binder.)

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• You can rename the collection to anything you want, and

you can change its colour by clicking on the little chevron
next to the collection name:

Go ahead and try changing the title and colour of the collection
you created.

Let’s add some more documents to the collection:

• Click back on the “Binder” tab and select some different

documents in the binder.

• Once you’ve selected some documents, drag and drop them

onto the collection tab.

• Click the collection tab again to return to the collection—the

documents you dragged onto the tab are now in the

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collection too. (Note: If you hold the mouse over the tab for a
moment before you drop, the collection will open
automatically, allowing you to drop the documents in a
particular place in the collection list.)

Tip: If you hold the Option key down while dragging a folder
onto a collection, then all its subdocuments will get added to the
collection too.

Search Collections
Let’s create a collection of all documents with their status marked
“To Do”:

1. Open project search by clicking on the magnifying glass in

the toolbar.

2. In the search field that appears above the binder, search for
“To Do”. The binder will be replaced with the purple search
results list.

3. Click on the magnifying glass icon on the left of the search

field and select “Status” from the menu that appears. The
search results will update to show only documents with a
status of “To Do”.

4. Click on the the magnifying glass in the search field again,

and this time select “Save Search As Collection…” from the
bottom of the menu.

5. Enter a name for the search, e.g. “To Do” (it will use the
search phrase by default) and hit “OK”.

The search results will now change colour and you will see that a

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new tab has appeared in the list of collections named “To Do”.
Again, you can rename this or change the colour to one of your
choosing, just as you can with arbitrary collections. The
magnifying glass icon on the left of the tab indicates that this is a
search collection.

Search collections are different to arbitrary collections in that you

can’t add documents to them or move them around. Instead, every
time you click on a search collection, the search gets run again. To
see what I mean:

1. Click back on the “Binder” tab.

2. Click on the “START HERE” document at the top of the

binder and hit the space bar to bring up a Quick Reference
panel.

3. Click on the “No Status” pop-up button in the bottom-right

of the Quick Reference panel and choose “To Do” from the
status menu.

4. Repeat this with a couple of other documents if you like.

5. Now click on the “To Do” collection again.

The “START HERE” document is now part of the “To Do”

collection.

Deleting Collections
To delete a collection, simply select its tab and then click on the “-”
button in the “Collections” header bar (you will be prompted to
confirm the deletion). Deleting a collection has no effect on its
constituent documents—they are not deleted and remain in their

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place in the binder.

Closing Collections
You can close a collection and return to the binder at any time by
clicking the “X” button in the left of the collection header bar:

You can now unlock the editor either by Ctrl-clicking in the editor
header bar again and deselecting “Lock in Place”. You can also
hide the collections pane by choosing “Hide Collections” from the
“View” toolbar button menu.

In “The Basics”, we learned about how Bookmarks can be used to

store references to other documents. In this section, we’ll learn
how to use them in combination with Quick Reference Panels as a
powerful way of managing project-wide notes.

Note: Be sure to read the section on Quick Reference Panels before

reading this section!

First, we’re going to create a folder in the binder that we’ll use to
store project notes:

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1. In the binder, select the “Research” folder.

2. Click the “new folder” button in the binder footer bar (the
icon of a folder with a “+” inside it).

3. Name the new folder “Notes”.

4. Ensuring the new “Notes” folder is selected, go to Edit >

Move > Move Left. This will move the folder so that it is on the
same level as and directly below the “Research” folder.

5. If you want, give the folder a custom notebook icon by going

to Documents > Change Icon.

Next, we’ll add some notes to the folder and then add them to the
project bookmarks:

1. With the folder selected, click the “+” button in the binder
footer to create a couple of new documents inside it. Name
them anything you like, and feel free to type in them.

2. Select both documents and drag them onto the red

“Bookmarks” icon in the toolbar. This will add them to the
project bookmarks list. (Click on the “Bookmarks” toolbar
icon to check that the documents have been added.)

Now we’ll open up a Quick Reference panel and navigate between

our notes:

1. Select one of the documents you just created and then click
the “Quick Ref” toolbar icon, so that the document is opened
in its own Quick Reference panel.

⁃ Alternatively, drag the document and drop it on the

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“Quick Ref” icon—this will open it in a Quick

Reference panel without also opening it in the editor.

2. Click the bookmark icon in the left of the footer bar in the
Quick Reference panel. This will open a sidebar showing all
project bookmarks, including the two note documents you
just added.

You can now select documents in the Bookmarks sidebar to

navigate between them in the Quick Reference panel. This is a
great way of referring to notes and research in their own window.
And of course, you’re not limited to adding documents only from
your “Notes” folder—you can add documents from anywhere in
the project. (You can also refer to project bookmarks in the
inspector, as we saw in “The Basics”.)

To create a new document and add it to the project bookmarks in a

single step:

1. Click the “+” button in the footer bar beneath the Bookmarks
sidebar of the Quick Reference window. A drop-down panel
will appear, asking you where you want the new document
to be created.

2. From the pop-up menu, choose the “Notes” folder you

created earlier, and then click on “OK”.

⁃ If you tick “Don’t ask again”, from now on when you

create a new document in the Bookmarks sidebar of a
Quick Reference panel, you won’t see this drop-down
panel and the document will automatically be created
in the folder you previously selected. You can change
these settings at any time in the “Special Folders” area

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of Project Settings (available from the Project menu).

3. Name the new document.

A new document will be created inside the “Notes” folder, and it

will automatically be added to the Project Bookmarks. You can
drag items around in the Bookmarks sidebar of the Quick
Reference panel to reorder them (this only reorders the
Bookmarks, and not the placement of documents in the binder).

Note: Anything you add to the “Notes” folder in the binder will
not automatically be added to the Project Bookmarks, because
you can bookmark anything in the project. So if you create notes
in the “Notes” folder in the binder and want them added to the
Project Bookmarks, be sure to drag them to the “Bookmarks”
toolbar icon or Ctrl-click on them and add them to the
bookmarks from the contextual menu that appears.

Using a QuickReference panel in combination with Project

Bookmarks is therefore a great way of creating and keeping track
of notes on your project. And you can remove notes from the
Bookmarks list once you’re finished with them while keeping
them in the binder for future reference.

Splitting Documents
Suppose you start out creating a single document for each chapter.
Then, after your first draft, you realise that you want to break your
chapters up into smaller sections, so that you can restructure more
easily. No problem.

To split the text of a document into smaller pieces:

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1. Click into the text at the point you wish to split it apart.

2. In the main menu, go to Documents > Split > at Selection. The

document will be split in two at the cursor point.

Documents > Split > with Selection as Title works much the same way,
except you select a range of text before using it. The selected text
will become the title of the newly-created document.

Merging Documents
The opposite of splitting documents is merging them. If you have
a number of small documents in the binder that you want to
merge into a single document:

1. Select the documents you wish to merge in the binder.

2. From the main menu, choose Documents > Merge.

You aren’t limited to displaying the contents of only one group

in the corkboard or outliner—you can show the subdocuments
of several groups by “stacking” them. This is really easy to do:

1. Split the editor horizontally or vertically.

2. Click into the other editor to give it the focus.

3. Select “The Basics” in the binder.

4. Switch to corkboard mode if necessary.

5. Hold down the Command key and click on “Going

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Further” in the binder.

6. With the Command key still held down, click on “Tips” in

the binder.

Now scroll down through the corkboard. Note how the

subdocuments of each of the folders you selected are all
displayed on the corkboard, with a dividing line between each
section.

When viewing a stack of groups in the corkboard like this, the

footer view shows a button that allows you to chose whether to
display the sections as a grid (the default), in rows, or in
columns:

Try clicking on each of the different options to see how they

affect the corkboard.

Now try switching to outliner mode. You’ll see the three groups
you selected in the binder, and you can expand them to view
their contents.

The outliner and corkboard are not only great organisational

tools: they can also be used to navigate, just like the binder,
using the “Selection Affects Other Editor” tool:

1. Split the editor if necessary.

2. In the other editor, load any folder and switch to either

corkboard or outliner mode.

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Note the button containing an arrow pointing out of a box in

the footer bar:

That’s the “Selection Affects Other Editor” button. Click on it

now. You will notice that it turns blue, to indicate that it is on.
When this button is on, selecting documents in the corkboard or
outliner will open them in the other editor if there is a split.

Try clicking on one of the documents in the corkboard or

outliner, and you will see that it is opened in this editor (come
back here afterwards!). By turning this feature on, then, you can
use the corkboard or outliner to navigate through the other
editor.

Click the button again to deselect it (it will turn back grey to
indicate that “Selection Affects Other Editor” has been turned
off).

Navigating in Copyholders
Note: be sure to go through the section covering Copyholders in
“Referring to More Documents” before reading this section.

You can use this same button to navigate documents using

Copyholders. Try this:

1. Holding down Option on the keyboard, drag one of the

documents in the corkboard or outliner and drop it onto
the header bar above the corkboard or outliner. A
Copyholder split will open within the other editor.

2. Now click on the “Selection Affects Other Editor” button

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again so that it turns blue. Then click it a second time.

Now that a Copyholder is open, it will remain blue on
this second click, but the icon will change to show the
arrow pointing into the box. This indicates that selection
will now be opened in the Copyholder rather than in the
other editor.

3. Now try selecting documents in the corkboard or outliner

—see how they get opened in the Copyholder?

Hopefully you will see how useful this could be. For instance,
here’s a setup I use quite regularly:

• Binder open on left.

• Editor split vertically.

• Right editor in outliner mode with its Copyholder open at

the bottom

• “Selection Affects” button set to affect the Copyholder.

• Right editor Locked in Place (so that any clicks in the

binder only affect the left editor).

With this arrangement, I can use the binder to navigate the

editor on the left, and the outliner to navigate the Copyholder
below it, arranging and editing my manuscript on the left while
navigating through and referring to research and notes on the
right.

Scrivener’s corkboard is not like a real corkboard: on a real

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corkboard, you can pin cards anywhere; in Scrivener, the

corkboard is a linear list of of a group’s subdocuments laid out
in rows. However, there is a freeform mode, which allows you
to place cards anywhere and experiment.

You switch between freeform and regular modes using the

button on the right of the corkboard’s footer bar:

(You can also enter freeform mode by going to View > Corkboard
Options > Freeform.)

Try this now:

1. Split the editor if necessary.

2. In the other editor, select a folder in the binder and switch

to corkboard mode.

3. Click on the freeform mode button in the footer bar, as

indicated in the image above.

You can now drag cards around and drop them anywhere.
(Select multiple cards by clicking and dragging the mouse to
create a marquee rectangle and enclosing the cards you wish to
select.)

Dragging the cards around in freeform mode has no effect on

the order of their associated documents in the binder (unlike in
regular mode). If you arrange the cards in an order you would
like to be used in the binder, though, you can click the

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“Commit” button in the footer bar and Scrivener will change

the order of the documents in the binder to best fit their
arrangement on the freeform corkboard.

Feel free to play around with the cards (but don’t hit “Commit”
unless you want to mess up the order of the tutorial!), and once
you have finished, return to regular corkboard mode by clicking
on the grid icon on the left of the button you used to switch to
freeform mode (or go to View > Corkboard Options and deselect
Freeform).

In “The Basics”, we covered how coloured labels can be

assigned to documents, and how they can be used for anything.
There’s a cool way of viewing labels that we didn’t cover when
looking at the basics, though: labels can be displayed in threads
on the corkboard view. The easiest way to understand how this
works is to see it in action:

1. Split the editor if necessary.

2. In the other editor, load the “Writing and Editing” folder

under “Going Further”.

3. Switch to corkboard mode. You should see several cards

on the board.

4. From the main menu, select View > Corkboard Options >
Show Label Colors Along Edges so that you can see the label
colours in the corkboard. (You don’t need to do this, but
it’s useful for this demonstration.)

5. Either select View > Corkboard Options > Arrange by Label

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from the main menu, or click on this button in the footer

bar:

See what happens? Coloured lines appear stretching the width

of the corkboard, each representing a label. Each card is placed
on the line that corresponds to the label associated with its
document, in the same order as it appears in the binder.

• Drag cards from left to right to change their positions in

the binder.

• Drag cards up and down to change their labels.

• Switch between horizontal and vertical lines using the

button in the footer bar.

If you’re writing a novel and use labels to keep track of the

point-of-view character or subplot for each document, this is a
great way of viewing all the threads in a group. (And combined
with viewing multiple groups, you could even view threads for
the entire manuscript.)

Importing Files
To bring in writing and research from other apps:

1. In Scrivener’s binder, select the folder into which you wish

to import the new files. Or, select the file under which you
wish the files to be imported. (If you select a folder, the
imported files will be placed inside it as the last items; if you
select a file, imported files will be placed directly beneath it.)

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2. Go to File > Import > Files… in the main menu.

3. In the file browser window that appears, select the files that
you want to import.

4. Click “Import”.

All selected files and folders will be imported, including

subdirectories, reproducing the file structure from the Finder in
Scrivener’s binder. Imported text files will be converted so that
they can be edited inside Scrivener. All other files will be copied
into Scrivener.

Note: If you selected a folder or file contained inside the “Draft”

folder in step (1) above, you will only have the option of
importing text file types from the file browser, because the
“Draft” folder only supports text files.

Scrivener can import many different file types:

• Word documents (.docx, .doc), rich text files (.rtf, .rtfd), plain
text files (.txt), OpenOffice documents (.odt) and Final Draft
files (.fdx) are imported as text that can be edited inside
Scrivener.

⁃ Note that we are unable to support the Apple Pages

file format because Apple has not made the format
public. To import documents from Pages, first export
them from Pages as .docx files, and then import
the .docx files into Scrivener.

• Image, movie, sound and PDF files are copied into Scrivener
and can be viewed in its editor.

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• All other files are copied into Scrivener and are displayed in
the editor using macOS’s Quick Look viewer.

Importing Web Pages

You can import web pages by selecting Import > Web Page… from
the File menu.

Import and Split

Perhaps you have already written a long document and you want
to bring it into Scrivener and break it up into smaller sections. You
could do that by importing it following the steps above and then
using the Split at Selection feature. Another option is to use Import
and Split:

1. From the main menu, select Files > Import > Import and Split…

2. In the browser that appears, select the file that you wish to
import.

3. In the “Sections are separated by” box, enter the text that
represents splits in your document. For instance, you could
use Insert > Break > Page Break to enter a page break character
in here and have your document split at each new page. Or
you could enter a couple of return characters, or a separator
character you have used in the text (e.g. “#”).

4. For Final Draft files, you can choose which script element to
split sections at—you will usually want to leave this as
“Scene Heading”.

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5. Click “Import”.

Your text will now be imported as multiple documents. Go

through them and do any necessary clean-up. You can split them
further using the Split at Selection feature.

There are three ways of getting work out in Scrivener:

1. Compile the Draft folder into a single document for printing

or exporting.

2. Print the contents of the current editor using File > Print
Current Document…

3. Export individual documents from the binder—this is what

we will look at here.

Exporting allows you to get anything you have brought into

Scrivener out again, or to export individual text files to popular
word processor formats. To export:

1. In the binder, select all of the files you want to export.

2. From the main menu, select File > Export > Files…

3. If multiple files were selected, you will be prompted to enter

the name of a directory that will be created in the Finder to
hold the files.

4. Choose your preferred text file format from the pop-up

menu next to “Export text files as”.

⁃ Note: This option is available even if you are only

exporting image or media files. In that case, it only has
any effect if you choose to export the notes associated

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with such files too.

5. Go through the “Metadata” and “Options” settings.

6. Click “Export”.

The selected files will be exported with the binder structure intact
—folders in the binder will become folders in the Finder.

Scrivener is also available for iOS so that you can write and
structure while on your iPhone or iPad. The iOS version is
available as a separate purchase from the App Store. Below we
cover how to sync between platforms for those who also own the
iOS version. If you don’t have Scrivener for iPhone or iPad, you
can ignore this section.

Setting Up Dropbox on Your Mac

You need to store any projects you wish to sync on Dropbox. You
can get a free Dropbox account from http://
www.getdropbox.com. You’ll need to download the Dropbox app
and install it on your Mac. Assuming you have Dropbox installed
on your Mac:

1. Locate any Scrivener projects you want to sync in the Finder.

⁃ Tip: You can easily locate any project by opening it in

Scrivener and then selecting File > Show Project in Finder
from the main menu.

2. Ensure any projects you want to sync are closed. This is very
important—if you leave any projects open in Scrivener while
moving them into Dropbox, you could end up corrupting

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them and losing data.

3. In the Finder, open another window (File > New Finder

Window in the Finder menu) and open your Dropbox folder
in it (select “Dropbox” in the Finder sidebar).

4. Create a folder in which to store the projects you wish to

sync with iOS. To sync, you must have a folder on Dropbox
that you use only for sharing Scrivener projects between
devices. The standard folder that the iOS version uses is /
Apps/Scrivener, so if you want to use that, inside the
Dropbox folder you would create a new folder named
“Apps” (if it doesn’t already exist) and then inside that you
would create a folder called “Scrivener”. However, you can
create and use any folder you want for this, just as long as
you only use it for storing Scrivener projects. (The reason
you should only store Scrivener projects inside it is that
everything in this folder will be synced to your iOS device,
so anything else in the folder would take up unnecessary
space on your device.)

5. Move the projects you located in (1) into the folder you
created in (4), for instance by dragging and dropping them.

6. At this point, you can reopen the projects (e.g. by double-

clicking on them in the Finder).

When creating a new project, if you want to sync it with iOS, be

sure to save it into the Dropbox folder you created in (4) when
asked where to choose a location for the new project. (If you don’t,
you can still move it later using the steps above.)

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Setting Up Dropbox on Your iPad or iPhone

Next, open Scrivener on your iPhone and do the following:

1. Tap the “sync” icon at the top of the projects screen and
select Link Dropbox. As long as you have an internet
connection, this will bring up the Dropbox sign-in window,
allowing you to sign in to your Dropbox account.

2. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll be asked to choose a folder on

Dropbox with which to sync your Scrivener projects. Be sure
to choose the folder you set up in step (4) of “Setting Up
Dropbox on Your Mac”.

⁃ Note: You can change this folder at any time by tapping

“Edit” in the nav bar at the top of the projects screen,
then tapping the gear icon in the footer bar that
appears and selecting Dropbox Settings.

3. Once you’ve chosen a folder, Scrivener will sync with

Dropbox, downloading any files you have placed in your
shared Dropbox folder. Projects stored on Dropbox will
appear in their own section at the top of the projects list.

When you create a new project on iOS, you will be asked where to
save it. If you choose to save it to Dropbox, after you sync, it will
automatically appear in the Dropbox folder you created on your
Mac, so that you can open the project there, too.

Making Changes to Projects

Now that you have your project on both your Mac and iOS device,
you need to make sure it is synced between devices whenever you

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make changes. Here’s how:

1. On macOS, the Dropbox app you downloaded from

dropbox.com is always running in the background.
Whenever a file is changed in the Dropbox folder, the
Dropbox app automatically uploads it to the Dropbox
servers. Whenever the Dropbox app detects new files on the
Dropbox servers, it automatically downloads them to the
Dropbox folder on your Mac. Whenever it is uploading or
downloading files, it shows a “syncing” badge in the
Dropbox icon in the menu bar:

2. When you’ve finished editing on your Mac and want to open

the project on iOS, it is very important that you wait for the
“syncing” badge to disappear from the Dropbox icon in the
Mac menu bar. Only when it disappears have all the files
uploaded to the Dropbox servers. Until then, there is no way
for the iOS version to download all of your changes, so if
you don’t wait, you could end up with an incomplete sync
and files missing from your project.

3. Once you’re sure Dropbox has finished syncing on your Mac,

on your iOS device, open Scrivener and tap the “sync” icon
in the nav bar of the projects screen. A progress bar will
appear while the updated files download.

4. Once the sync has finished, you are ready to open and edit
the project on your iOS device.

5. When you’ve finished making edits on iOS, tap the “sync”

icon once again in the projects screen. (The sync icon is also

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available in the nav bar while editing documents inside a

project, and in the share button in the footer bar of the
editor.) Once again, a progress bar will appear, this time to
indicate that your changed files are being uploaded to the
Dropbox servers. Wait for the sync to complete.

6. When you return to your Mac, if the project is still open, a

message should appear telling you that changes have been
made and asking if you want to sync them. Before clicking to
start the sync, though, make sure that the Dropbox app has
finished downloading all the changed files. As you did
before syncing on iOS, check the Dropbox icon in the menu
bar on your Mac and do not tell Scrivener to sync the
changes until the “syncing” badge has disappeared. Once
you are sure Dropbox has finished syncing, tell Scrivener to
sync the changes. The project will close and reopen
automatically, now with all the changes you made on iOS in
place.

⁃ If you don’t see a message telling you that there are

changes, you can go to File > Sync > with Mobile Devices
to force Scrivener to look for changes.

⁃ If the project was closed, only reopen it when you are

sure Dropbox has finished syncing. When you open
the project, all of the changes you made on iOS will be
there.

Resolving Sync Problems

If your iOS device tells you that a project you downloaded from
your Mac seems to be invalid, it is most likely because you didn’t
let Dropbox on macOS finish syncing all files before you

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downloaded them to iOS. To solve this issue, ensure the Dropbox

app has finished syncing on your Mac, and then tap “sync” again
on iOS to download the rest of the files.

Try not to edit a project on both devices without syncing, as this

can lead to conflicts. For instance, suppose you make some
changes on iOS, and then return to your Mac and make some
changes to the project without first tapping “sync” in iOS and
waiting for Dropbox to download the changes to your Mac. In this
case, conflicts will arise. Scrivener will do its best to resolve such
conflicts, but it’s always better to try to avoid this happening.

You can assign any file or folder a custom icon via Documents >
Change Icon. Some of the documents in this project have custom
icons assigned, such as the folders using yellow book icons and the
“START HERE” document, among others.

To see this feature in action, let’s try setting up another root folder
in which we will store information about characters:

1. Lock the editor so that this document stays on screen (Ctrl-

click in the header bar and select “Lock In Place”).

2. Select the “Research” folder in the binder.

3. Click on the “add folder” button in the footer bar at the

bottom of the binder.

4. A new folder is created inside the “Research” folder. Rename

the new folder “Characters”.

5. From the Edit menu, choose Move > Left. Your new folder is

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now a root folder—that is, it is now as far left as it can go, on

the same level as the Draft, Research and Trash folders.

Our new “Characters” folder looks fairly generic so far, and this is
where the custom icon feature comes in. In our example, we are
going to use our new folder to store notes about different
characters in a novel, so we want to assign it an appropriate icon:

1. Select the “Characters” folder.

2. Go to Documents > Change Icon (or Ctrl-click on the folder

and select “Change Icon” from the contextual menu).

3. Choose Characters > Photo (or any icon you want).

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.

(You can unlock the editor now.)

Note: Make sure you go through the Custom Icons section before
reading this section, so that you have a “Characters” folder set up.

One of the philosophies behind Scrivener is that it doesn’t force

you into a particular workflow. You can write any sort of long-
form text in Scrivener, setting up your project to fit the task at
hand. Therefore, Scrivener doesn’t assume that everyone writing a
novel (for example) uses character sheets to keep track of character
information, or prompt sheets for information about locations.
Instead, Scrivener provides the means to set up “document
templates” that can generate items such as character sheets for
those who use them.

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Document templates allow you to set up a document in the project

and use it as the basis for creating new documents. Let’s try
creating a couple to see how this works.

1. Go to the Project menu and select New From Template. Note

how there is just a dummy menu item in there saying “No
templates folder set for project”.

1. Click the arrow next to the green “+” icon in the toolbar.
You’ll see there are three items in there: “New Text”, “New
Folder” and “Import Web Page” (which will be disabled if a
document contained in the Draft folder is selected in the
binder, because you can’t import web pages into the text-
only Draft folder). Don’t select anything—we’re just looking
at what’s there at the moment.

We’re going to add a couple of different types of document to

these menus.

Next, take a look inside the “Research” folder in the binder

(expand it if necessary by clicking the disclosure triangle next to
it). Inside it you will find a “Sheets” folder, which contains two
documents, “Character Sheet” and “Location Sheet”. Take a look at
these documents. They contain text that could be used for very
basic character or location sheets, which you might fill in for each
character or location you are going to write about in a novel.

These documents are just regular text documents—you can type

whatever you want in there. To see what I mean, select the
“Location” document and then click on “+” in the toolbar so that a
new blank document gets created. Name it to anything you want,
and then type something inside the document.

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Setting a Templates Folder

Now we’re going to tell Scrivener that the documents inside the
“Sheets” folder should be treated as document templates—that is,
that we want to be able to create new documents based on them:

1. Go to Project > Project Settings…

2. Select “Special Folders” in the sidebar.

3. Under “Templates Folder”, select the “Sheets” folder from

the pop-up menu.

The icon of the “Sheets” folder will change to be a white “T”

against a blueprint background, and the “T” will also appear in the
corner of each document inside it. This indicates that the folder is
now acting as the project’s templates folder and that anything
inside it can be used as the basis for a new document.

What does this mean? Let’s try returning to the menus we looked
at a moment ago:

1. Click the “Characters” folder with the custom icon that you
created when looking at Custom Icons. It should currently be
empty.

2. Go to the Project menu and select New From Template again.

You’ll notice that it’s no longer empty—it now shows the
contents of the “Sheets” templates folder.

3. From the menu, select “Character Sheet”. A new document

will be created inside the “Characters” folder—a document
identical to the “Character Sheet” document in the templates
folder. Change the title and edit the text in the document

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itself.

4. Now click the arrow next to the green “+” button in the
toolbar. This time there will be more items in the menu that
appears—the contents of our templates folder is there, too.
This time choose “Location Sheet”.

The two new documents you just created are copies of the
documents in the templates folder. And that’s really all the
templates folder is—somewhere for you to put documents that
you want to use as the basis for other documents, and which, in
combination with the New From Template menu, makes it very easy
to create copies of those documents anywhere you want in the
project.

Set Folders to Use Templates by Default

That “Characters” folder we created earlier is there to hold
character sheets for all the characters in our novel. At the moment,
every time we want to add a new character sheet to it, we have to
use the New From Template menu. There’s an easier way, though:

1. Select the “Characters” folder in the binder.

2. Go to Documents > Default Template for Subdocuments in the

main menu.

3. Select “Character Sheet”.

Now try pressing the green “+” button in the toolbar or the “+”
button at the bottom of the binder. See what happens? The
“Characters” folder now automatically uses the “Character Sheet”
template whenever you create a new document inside it, without

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you having to use the New From Template menu each time

Scrivener comes with a range of project templates that can be used

as the basis for new projects. To create a new project from a
template:

1. From the main menu, choose File > New Project…

2. In the templates chooser panel that appears, select a category

in the sidebar.

3. Select one of the templates in the category.

4. Click “Choose…”

Note that the “Blank” project type is not technically a template.

“Blank” creates an empty project that is not based on a template. I
created all of the project templates (“Novel”, “Novel (with Parts)”,
“Research Proposal”, “Comic Script” and so on) by starting from a
blank project. For each one, I then added some extra folders with
some custom icons, set up some document templates, changed a
few project settings, and then saved the resulting project as a
template which I then included with Scrivener.

You can create your own project templates in the same way. Here’s
how:

1. Create a new project, either from the “Blank” template or

from any other template (you might just want to customise
one of the existing templates).

⁃ Tip: When basing your template on an existing project

template, hold down the Option key when clicking
“Choose…” to create the project. This prevents

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Scrivener from auto-filling title pages and such with

information from Contacts.

2. Edit the project so that it contains all the elements and

settings you want in new projects created from your
template.

3. Select Save As Template… from the File menu.

4. From the “New Project Template” panel that appears, enter a

title and description for the new template, choose a category
and icon, then click on “OK”.

5. Go to File > New From Template… You will find the template
you just created available as the basis for new projects. At
this point you can delete the project from which you created
the template, if you so wish.

Scrivener projects are saved on disk as files with the extension

“.scriv” and are actually package files. A “package file” is a file that is
really a folder, but which looks like, and is treated like, a file by the
macOS file system.

To see what I mean, try the following:

1. Ctrl-click on a .scriv file in the Finder.

2. Select “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu that

appears.

The Finder now shows the innards of your .scriv package. Take a look

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inside the “Files/Data” folder, for instance.

You will (reassuringly, I hope) discover that all of your work is stored
as multiple RTF and XML files inside various subfolders. This means
that even in the worst possible crash case, if a .scriv file became
hopelessly corrupted (although I hope this will never happen), you
would still be able to open and edit all of your work in another
program that supports RTF files.

That said, you should not edit the RTF files inside a .scriv package in
any other program if you intend to keep using them inside Scrivener,
as this may cause problems in Scrivener. Use the Export Files feature if
you want to get your individual files out for use with another
program.

Changing the Default Formatting for New

Documents
You can change the default formatting used for new documents like
this:

1. In the editor, set up some text with the formatting you want to
use for all new documents, and ensure the cursor is inside it.

2. From the main menu, select Scrivener > Preferences…

3. Select “Editing” in the toolbar.

4. Select the “Formatting” tab.

5. Click the “Use Formatting in Current Editor” button.

From now on, whenever you create a new blank document and start

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typing, the text will the formatting you set up in (1).

Alternatively, instead of setting up the text in the editor, you can set
the formatting in the text area of the Editing > Formatting pane in the
Preferences.

Changing the Default Formatting for Only a Single

Project
Sometimes, you may have a project that needs to use different default
formatting from other projects. You can set this up as follows:

1. From the main menu, select Project > Project Settings…

2. Select “Formatting” in the sidebar.

3. Set up the text in the “Main Text Formatting” text area, or click
on the “Use Current” button to use the formatting in the current
editor.

NOTE: This tutorial is set up to use this option.

Applying Default Formatting to Existing Documents

Setting the default formatting in the Preferences or Project Settings
has no effect on existing documents. (Scrivener could ruin special
formatting you have applied if it changed the formatting for all your
documents automatically every time you changed the preferences.)
To apply the default formatting to existing documents:

1. In the binder, select the documents you want to update.

2. From the main menu, select Documents > Convert > Text to Default

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Formatting…

3. Check the options in the panel that appears and then click
“OK”.

To insert an image into your manuscript:

1. Click into the editor and place the cursor where you would like
the image to be inserted.

2. Go to Insert > Image From File… in the main menu.

3. Select the image file you would like to insert.

Alternatively, drag an image from the Finder (or an image file from
the binder) into the editor.

Note that you do not use File > Import > Files… or drag images into the
binder from the Finder to import images. Importing images into the
binder creates an image document. Image documents are used for
research or reference and are not part of your manuscript.

Sometimes you will want numbers to appear in the text whose value
may change depending on the arrangement of the text. For instance,
you might want to title a document “Chapter 1”, but if you move it
later, it might become “Chapter 2”. For this, you can use
“placeholders”.

To insert an auto-number placeholder, go to Insert > Auto-Number in

the main menu and pick a number type. A tag will be inserted into
the text. For example, if you select “1, 2, 3, 4, 5…”, the following tag
will be inserted:

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This tag will be replaced with a number when using Compile. There
are many other placeholders you can use in Scrivener—a full list is
available from Help > List of All Placeholders…

You can use placeholders in the text, in document titles, or in your

own Compile formats. Many of the Compile formats provided with
Scrivener use placeholders to insert chapter numbering. To see this,
try the following:

1. Go to File > Compile…

2. Select “Manuscript (Times)” from the Formats sidebar.

3. Click on the “+” button in the footer.

4. Select “Duplicate & Edit Format…” from the menu that

appears. The Compile window will change to show the options
for creating a format.

5. Ensure “Section Layouts” is selected in the sidebar.

6. Select “Chapter Heading” in the section layouts list.

7. Select the “Title Options” tab.

You will see that the “Title Prefix” text box contains the following
text:

Chapter One

This is what adds “Chapter One”, “Chapter Two” and so on to the

start of each chapter when you use the “Manuscript (Times)” format

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to compile your manuscript.

By default, Scrivener’s editor uses a “fixed width”, so that when the

editor is expanded beyond a certain width, the text will appear as a
column in its centre. If you would prefer the text to take up the full
width of the editor, you can turn this behaviour off via the
Preferences:

1. Go to Scrivener > Preferences… in the main window.

2. Select the “Appearance” tab at the top.

3. Select “Main Editor” from the sidebar.

4. Deselect “Use fixed width editor”.

If you’re running on macOS 10.14 Mojave or above, you will notice

that Scrivener fully supports macOS’s dark mode. Scrivener’s
interface will automatically switch to a dark appearance whenever
you choose “Dark” for the “Appearance” in System Preferences. You
can also determine Scrivener’s appearance independently of the
System Preferences as follows:

• From the Scrivener > Appearance menu, choose “Dark” to force

Scrivener to use a dark appearance at all times, even when the
system is using a light appearance.

• From the Scrivener > Appearance menu, choose “Light” to force

Scrivener to use a light appearance at all times, even when the
system is using a dark appearance.

To reset these options, simply choose “System Default” from the

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Scrivener > Appearance menu. Scrivener will return to using

whichever appearance is set in the System Preferences.

When in Dark Mode, you can further choose whether the main text
areas of project windows should use a light or dark appearance.
Using a light appearance for the main editors allows you to see
custom text colours exactly as they would appear when compiled;
using a dark appearance provides a fully dark environment across the
entire interface.

To switch between light and dark editors, change the “Keep Main
Editors Light” setting in the Scrivener > Appearance menu (only
available in Dark Mode), or use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Cmd-
Opt-L.

Sometimes you will want to navigate through the binder while

keeping the document in the editor pinned in place. “Lock in Place”
allows this:

1. Ctrl-click on the header view to bring up the header bar menu.

2. Select “Lock in Place”.

The header bar will turn pink, indicating that the editor is now
“locked”. When an editor is locked, clicks in the binder have no effect
on it.

If you have split the editor so that two editors are visible on screen,
clicks in the binder will go to the unlocked editor, no matter where
the focus is. (You can turn off this behaviour via the “Behaviors” Pane
of the Preferences, under “Navigation” in the sidebar.)

Ctrl-click on the header and deselect “Lock in Place” to remove the

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lock.

Transcribing audio and media files in Scrivener is easy with the split
view. Try the following:

1. Split the editor vertically or horizontally.

2. Click into one of the editors.

3. In the binder, select “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” inside the “Research”

folder so that it loads in the editor. “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” is an
audio file, so you won’t see much other than the play controls
when you mouse over the editor. (Actually, that audio file is the
beginning of the coolest phone message I ever picked up; sadly,
the message was not for me).

Now you can play the audio file in one editor while typing in the
other.

You can control the media file using the keyboard shortcuts defined
in the Navigate > Media menu. Cmd-Return will play or pause the file,
for instance, without your having to click away from your typing.

Also note the button in the left of the media file’s footer bar:

That is the “pause and rewind” button. If you click it, it will turn
blue, indicating that it is on. When “pause and rewind” is turned on,
whenever you pause the media file it will automatically be rewound
a couple of seconds (you can determine exactly how many seconds it
gets rewound in the Behaviors pane of the Preferences, under

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“Playback”). This is very useful for transcription.

Scrivener features a “Linguistic Focus” feature that allows you to fade

out other text in the editor except for certain speech types. For
instance, you can fade out everything except your adverbs, to check
for overuse.

You can bring up the Linguistic Focus panel by going to Edit > Writing
Tools > Linguistic Focus… in the main menu. Then simply select a part
of speech to focus on.

This feature uses linguistic analysis tools that are built into macOS,
but it also adds something else: dialogue focus. Selecting “Direct
Speech” as the focus will fade out all text except for that contained
between speech marks. If you are writing a novel or story, this is a
great way of checking the flow of a conversation you have written
without being distracted by all of the action and attributions.

Having problems coming up with character names? Scrivener comes

with a name generator, available from Edit > Writing Tools > Name
Generator…

You can print individual documents, the contents of the outliner, and
index cards from the corkboard, by using File > Print Current
Document… in the main menu.

You can change various options pertaining to printing as follows:

1. In the main menu, go to File > Page Setup…

2. From the pop-up menu that says “Page Attributes” at the top,
select “Scrivener”.

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In “The Basics”, we looked at creating snapshots and viewing them in

the inspector.

If you ever want more space to read through a snapshot, you can
drag a snapshot from the list in the inspector onto the header view of
the editor to load it there.

Try this now:

1. Split the editor.

2. Take a snapshot of this document (Cmd-5).

3. Write some text below:

⁃ Type here:

4. Open the inspector and switch to the snapshots pane if

necessary.

5. Drag the snapshot you just took from the list in the inspector to
the header bar of the other editor. The snapshot is now
displayed in the other editor.

6. Now try dragging the snapshot from the inspector list again,
but this time hold down Option on the keyboard as you drop it
onto the header bar. The editor will now show the differences
between the snapshot and the current version of the document.

Scrivener keeps track of how many words and characters you write
every day. To see a breakdown of how many words you’ve written
each day and month for a particular project, go to Project > Writing

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History…

By default, when you drag items around in the binder or outliner,

you can drop them on other items as well as between them. Dropping
“on” an item places the dropped document inside the document it
was dropped on, as a subdocument.

Holding the Option key down while dragging restricts this behaviour
so that you can only drop between documents—this can be useful
when you want a little more accuracy.

Drag Text to the Binder

You can create new documents from sections of text in the editor as
follows:

1. Select some text in the editor.

2. Click on the text and hold to begin a drag.

3. Drag the text into the binder.

A new document will be created containing the dragged text.

Drag Text from the Binder

You can insert the text of a binder document into another binder
document like this:

1. In the editor, open the document into which you want to insert
the text.

2. In the binder, locate the document whose text you wish to

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insert.

3. Drag the document from the binder into the editor, holding
down the Option key on the keyboard as you drop.

The text of the document will be copied into the editor.

A quick way of adding documents to the project bookmarks list is by

dragging them from the binder and dropping them onto the red
“Bookmarks” toolbar icon.

By default, clicking on a document link opens it in the other editor;

double-clicking the icon of a bookmark from the inspector list opens
it in a Quick Reference panel.

You can change this behaviour and determine how you would like
links and bookmarks to be opened as follows:

1. In the main menu, go to Scrivener > Preferences…

2. Click on “Behaviors” in the toolbar.

3. Select “Document Links” in the sidebar.

You will be presented with a number of options that allow you to

customise how document links and bookmarks are opened.

When assigning keywords to documents from the keywords panel,

you can simultaneously assign the groups to which they belong by
holding down the Option key while dragging. Try this:

1. Open the inspector and select the Metadata tab, ensuring the
Keywords pane is visible.

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2. Open the keywords panel (Project > Show Project Keywords).

3. Click on the triangle next to “Characters” in the panel to reveal

the names of some characters.

4. If you were to drag one of these character keywords to the

inspector keywords list, only the dragged keyword would be
assigned. However, try holding down the Option key whilst
dragging “John” to the inspector. Note how not only the
keyword “John” gets added, but also the name of its group,
“Characters”.

The index card in the inspector can be used to show an image instead
of a synopsis. If an image is used instead of a synopsis, then the
image will also be used on the corkboard. This could be useful if you
have a document about a character and want a photo to represent the
character on the corkboard, for instance.

To use an image in the index card for a document:

1. Open the Inspector.

2. Select the notes pane so that the synopsis and notes are
displayed.

3. In the synopsis header bar, click on the icon of the picture. The
synopsis area will be replaced with a grey area saying “Drop an
image here.”

4. Locate the image you wish to use in the Finder and drag it into
the grey area.

To switch back to the synopsis, click on the index card icon in the
synopsis header bar (this will not remove the image, but just toggle

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back to displaying the synopsis).

Generally, Scrivener is set up to assume that each project contains a

single book (or writing project): when you compile, you compile the
entire Draft folder into a single manuscript. However, you don’t have
to work this way. Perhaps you are working on a series of books that
rely on the same research, for instance—in that case, you might want
to set up a project to contain multiple books. Here’s how:

1. Inside the Draft folder, setup a subfolder for each book.

2. Treat each subfolder inside the Draft folder as though it were

the Draft folder for one of your books, creating your chapters
for each book inside the book subfolder.

3. Adjust the section type settings under “Default Types by

Structure” in Project Settings as necessary, so that they correctly
reflect the updated structure.

Then, when you want to compile one of the books:

1. Go to File > Compile…

2. Above the list of documents on the right side of the Compile

panel, click on the pop-up menu next to where it says
“Compile” (this pop-up normally shows the name of your Draft
folder).

3. Select the folder containing the book you wish to compile.

4. Tick “Treat compile group as complete manuscript”. This tells

Scrivener that the folder you are compiling should be treated as
though it is a complete book and not part of a larger draft.

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5. Ensure “Include text of containing group” is not ticked.

Some project templates use information from Contacts to populate

title pages with your name and address. By default, it takes this
information from “My Card” in Contacts. If you would like Scrivener
to use a different Contacts card, simply type
“(Scrivener:UseMe)” (with no spaces and including the parentheses)
somewhere in the “note” area of the entry in Contacts you wish to
use.

Even easier: Go to Scrivener > Preferences and enter your details in

the “Author Information” section of the “General” pane.

If you find yourself opening and closing the binder and inspector
frequently, or spending a lot of time setting up the corkboard or
outliner view to appear in the right place for a particular task, check
out the Layouts feature:

From the main menu, select Window > Layouts > Manage Layouts…

This allows you to save the state of the interface and quickly return to
it at a later time, either via the layouts panel or the Window > Layouts
menu.

Layouts can also be accessed through the View button which appears
on the very left of the toolbar by default. Several useful built-in
Layouts are provided for you.

If you have to gather a lot of research in other applications and find

yourself doing a lot of copying and pasting into Scrivener, the Scratch
Pad and clippings features may come in handy.

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Scratch Pad
The scratch pad is a panel that can be called up from any other
application using a keyboard shortcut that you set in the “General”
pane of the Preferences (the default shortcut is Shift-Cmd-Return).
You can paste or type notes into it and send them to one of your open
projects either straight away or at some point later (scratch pad notes
are saved in a folder on your hard drive that you can specify in the
preferences—they are not part of any project).

Clippings Services
Scrivener also makes some clipping features available via the global
macOS Services menu. To enable them:

1. Open System Preferences.

2. Open the “Keyboard” pane of System Preferences.

3. Select the “Shortcuts” tab at the top.

4. Select “Services” in the sidebar.

5. Scroll down to the “Scrivener” services in the list and tick any
that you wish to enable.

Although Scrivener is designed to be as stable as possible, and its

auto-save should ensure your work is constantly saved, with
important writing projects it’s always a good idea to make regular
backups, saved to either cloud services or external hard drives, so
that your work is always safe no matter what happens.

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Automatic Backups
By default, Scrivener will back up a project every time it is closed,
and up to a maximum of five backups of each project will be kept
around (with newer backups replacing older ones). You can change
this behaviour and also choose the folder in which automatic backups
are stored, as follows:

1. From the main menu, choose Scrivener > Preferences…

2. Click on the “Backup” toolbar icon in the Preferences panel that

appears.

You will be presented with a number of options that allow you to

determine when and how backups are made.
Click the “Choose…” button next to “Backup location” to change the
automatic backups folder, and click the “Open backup folder…”
button to open the folder currently used for backups in the Finder.

Manual Backups
There are two ways of manually creating a backup of a project:

1. Go to File > Backup > Back Up Now. This will create a new backup
of the project in the automatic backups folder (as determined by
the Preferences).

2. Go to File > Back Up > Back Up To… You will be presented with a
chooser panel, allowing you to choose where the backup should
be saved.

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If at any time you decide you want to wipe all of your edits and
restore the tutorial to its original state, follow these steps:

1. Ctrl-click or right-click on the project title right at the very top

of the tutorial project window. A menu will appear showing the
path to the project.

2. Click on the second item in the menu, which will be the folder
in which the tutorial project is stored. This will open a Finder
window.

3. Close the tutorial project in Scrivener.

4. In the Finder window that opened in (2), move the tutorial

project to the Trash in your Dock.

5. Back in Scrivener, go to Help > Interactive Tutorial… You will be

prompted to create a fresh tutorial project.

Tutorial