One of the things I undertake when using a piece of software, is very shortly after using it, I try to learn all of the tweaks you can do to make it more usable. I understand most people don’t do this. But I went to college at one point for computer programming, got disillusioned and quit.
So I know something about software environment. There’s usually two ways to do everything, and there’s usually features built in to software that the programmer knows the average person will not use, but the programmer himself will.
Scrivener is kind of unusual in that the programmer gives you access to those hidden features. I’m hampered by my personal choice of a PC instead of a Mac, as the programmer for Scrivener decided to not carry over two very important features to the PC version, the “Words by date” feature and the “Compare snapshots” function.
So, Meta-Tags. That was the first question I had. They’re there for something. Keywords and Meta-Tags.
Ah. A quick search of the videos on the L&L website shows me that Meta-Tags allow you to track certain things . Like what? What do you want to track?
Character, POV, Scene, Date. Since my books are deadline-centered. I can track what characters are in what scenes, whose POV it is, where it is, and WHEN it is. Now, you go to the Scrivenings view (icon 3), and click on the little square above the drag line… and add those meta-tags into your view.
Voila! (pronounced “Walla”)! Now you can track those things! You may have to restart your Scrivener to be able to enter the meta-tag info in all three views, but now you can track that.
Then I found that under views, you can apply the color schemes for “scene”, “Chapter” “Character” to your left hand column. COOL! “View”>”Use Label Color inh”>”Binder” & “Icons”. So in other words, you can choose Binder (The left hand column) and icons. Play with it, choose all four, decide what you like, decide what you don’t like. You may go back and forth on it per project. more stimulus equals more creativeness, or less intrusive equals less distraction.
There you go! A couple of tweaks you can use!
