Useful Tips - Customising Scrivener Video Lecture | Master the Skills: Scrivener - Career Development

as writers ourselves we're aware of how
important it is to be comfortable in
your writing environment so Scrivener
provides all sorts of ways you can
customize how it looks and behaves
letting you adapt the Scrivener
environment to better fits the way you
work we'll start by looking at
preferences which can be found in the
main application menu click Scrivener
then preferences you'll find different
categories of preferences here starting
with general preferences where you can
adjust startup settings such as whether
Scrivener reopens projects that were
open when you last quit how often
Scrivener also saves the interface
language and where to find shared
templates if any of your projects have a
bibliography you can also link your
preferred citation software from here
the next pane controls your editing
preferences and is split into three tabs
options formatting and revisions will
cover formatting preferences in a
separate video and revisions allows you
to set the colors used by revision mode
a feature of Scrivener intended for when
you're revising a manuscript we'll take
a quick look at options which controls
the default editor settings things like
the default text zoom level or the
writing direction which is normally set
by the language you're writing in but
can be set manually further down there
are checkboxes which control elements
like hyphenation whether your live count
shows words characters pages or a
combination and options that let you
disable the blinking insertion point
line let's also take a quick look at the
corrections pane this is where you can
set up auto corrections smart
punctuation Auto completion and a few
other settings there's also a button to
open the system text preferences where
you can manage text replacements and a
few other settings external to Scrivener
the appearance pane is where your
preferences really start to open out as
you might expect this is where you can
customize the appearance of different
elements of Scrivener by selecting them
from the list on the left you'll find
many of these have unique options as
well as the ability to change background
colors font and text for different
sections of the interface let's look at
the binder as an example on the options
tab you can set a custom row spacing for
binder items navigate to fonts and you
can change the font used by the binder
for example if you prefer a serif font
like Palatino or a typewriter style font
like Courier the binder defaults to the
system font for your Mac and you can
always return to this from the drop down
list at the bottom you also have the
option to use bold font for folders or
document groups within your binder
moving to the collars tab you can set a
background color for the binder using
the standard Mac OS color options watch
what happens when I move the brightness
down past 50% the text switches color
from black to white automatically so if
you prefer to look at light text on a
dark background to reduce screen glare
that's something you can set here in the
appearances pane you can revert to the
default color any time by clicking use
default color another example we'll
touch on is the corkboard appearance
settings which have a number of options
for the corkboard display over in the
colors tab here you can set different
background for snapped corkboards
freeform cork boards and label view and
the drop down list will let you set a
cork board texture or even a custom
background image for one or all of these
it's worth taking a look through the
appearance pane yourself if you're the
type of writer who likes to customize
how their writing environment looks the
behaviors pane allows you to fine-tune
how some of the elements of Scrivener
work and in some cases there are custom
behaviours for certain actions like
double clicking the categories on the
left hand side grouped these together
there are settings here for composition
mode some of which may be useful if you
write with more than one monitor
document links controls what happens
when you create a text link from one
document in Scrivener to another and
where these links open when you click on
them double clicking allows you to add
another level of interaction with the
cork board background double-clicking
either to create a new card or to move
up to the parent folder cork board
dragging and dropping has a few options
which adds to or change dragging and
dropping behavior for example the
ability to quickly duplicate a document
by dragging it while holding the option
key folders and files controls some
options related to the creation and
display of items in the binder and
search results navigation allows you to
set how the editor and binder interact
when you lock an editor in place allows
you to load bookmarked webpages in the
sidebar and controls where the space key
opens documents from the cork board and
the outliner in the editor or in a quick
reference panel playback controls
whether the media player rewinds a few
seconds when you pause it snapshots
allows you to toggle a sound or visual
notification when you create a snapshot
of your project return key has a couple
of settings related to the return keys
behavior in certain instances the
sharing tab has a few settings related
to importing and exporting projects you
might need to tweak some of the import
settings if you're importing documents
from word and want to convert the
footnotes but most of these can be left
out there default will come
the backup pain in a separate video
outside of your preferences there are
still some other ways to customize the
Scrivener environment there's a View
button in the toolbar which can show in
hi to the binder ruler and format bar as
well as switching to page view these
functions are also available from the
View menu along with a handful of other
options including the ability to
customize the toolbar selecting this
allows you to drag buttons to and from
the toolbar for example if you want to
regularly take snapshots of your work
adding the snapshot button to the
toolbar could make that feature more
accessible likewise if you want your
dictionary just one click away if you
want to reset to the default toolbar at
any point just drag the default set from
here back into the toolbar you can also
adjust whether you see the icons with
text below just the icons or just the
text sometimes you might want to
customize elements just for this project
but not for Scrivener as a whole for
this turn to project settings in the
project menu here you can set custom
background images for composition mode
setup project metadata and create custom
labels and status items some of this
will be covered in separate videos but
it's worth taking a look at for example
the label list can be customized to keep
track of point of view characters within
your novel will change the custom title
for labels to POV and then assign labels
to each chapter depending on who that
chapter centers on you can do the same
with status and even set a default label
or status for new documents so each new
document could be marked to do as soon
as it's created as you can see the range
of customization options Scrivener
offers is very broad and we recommend
doing some exploring of your own if you
want a closer look at any other features
of Scrivener our other videos should be
linked nearby thanks for watching and
happy writing