10 Awesome Features in Scrivener

The 500-page Scrivener PDF manual is well-written and comprehensive. In this post, I've collected some of my favorite features in Scrivener with pdfoo URLs back to relevant section of the Scrivener manual for details.


The text below includes pdfoo:// URLs which will work correctly on your Mac after installing PDFoo and assigning the "scrivman" prefix to the Scrivener v2.3.1 PDF manual (5.0 MB). See the post on Taming PDFs with PDFoo and how to Build Mindmaps with PDFoo URLs for details.

1. Collect and organize Research for your writing project, including web pages, PDFs and media files. See scrivman/11 Gathering Material/. Attach a synopsis or notes to each research document using the Inspector pane to locate it easily using the Find Synopsis window. Scrivener documents are RTF-based and support pdfoo URLs, making it possible to directly link into any TOC or page of your PDF reference collection.
2. Record audio into your project, pick a research folder to store the audio file. Supports pause & continue recording. Can also use your Mac’s isight camera to capture a quick sketch/document. See   scrivman/21.4 Recording Audio and Photo Notes/. 
   
3. Break up the book Project into a nested tree of short documents, to be ultimately compiled into a book. Split up a long document into many for more organizing flexibility. See scrivman/15.3 Editing with Scrivener/. Use the Scrivenings mode to combine several short documents into one long document temporarily for fluid editing. See scrivman/15.8 Editing Multiple Documents/.
   
4. Assign custom labels, keywords and status flags to your documents, which show up in an elegant visual layout in the Corkboard view. Labels and keywords show up as colored adornments on index cards. See scrivman/10.1 Meta-Data Types/. 
   
5. Connect relevant research materials to your document using the References pane in the Inspector. Scrivener also makes it possible to see all documents that refer to a particular research using backlinks. See scrivman/19.3 Document Support Panes/. 
   
6. Use the Find Synposis window (shortcut CTRL CMD G) to search and open up handy Quick Reference panels to support your writing. See scrivman/21.1 Searching and Replacing/. Use the Inspector pane to add/edit synposis for your documents and research to ensure the Find Synposis command works. See scrivman/19.1 Synopsis Card/.
   
7. Set up the Split editor for reviewing research materials while you write, and learn the keyboard shortcuts to control the contents of the inactive editor while you write. See scrivman/14.4 Splitting the Editor/.
   
8. Use colorful inline annotations in your document to serve as comments on specific parts of your document. See scrivman/18.1 Inline Notation/. These inline annotations can be exported as “margin comments” when compiling your project to .doc format for further processing. See scrivman/24.20 Footnotes/Comments/.
   
9. For books that require working with images, tables, and extensive cross-referencing, it is best to finish up editing in Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. Use the .doc compile format to export the book from Scrivener and import into Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. See scrivman/24.3 Available Compile Formats/.
   
10. Track progress on the entire project in terms of total words, or set targets for each writing session or document(s). See scrivman/21.3 Goals and Statistics Tracking Tools/.
    

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