If you’re new to Scrivener and right now this sounds complicated, don’t worry, it will become much clearer to you once you start using the program and creating documents.
This is also why built-in Scrivener templates have an information page that tell you how you should set up your binder structure in order to use the built in compiler setups. Without knowing what the compiler does at this moment, just know that once you compile your work in order to create your final output you can have different settings for files and folders.įor example, if you are writing a novel, all your folders could be chapters and they would automatically stick to a certain kind of formatting, while other documents are handled (“compiled”) differently.
The difference lies, again, in the compiler. So, why do you have the two? Why not only have documents that can hold other sub documents? You also can convert a file into a folder and vice versa at any time without losing any of your content. Files can hold content as well as folders can. Scrivener doesn’t really distinguish between files and folders in the sense that you need to create a file in order to create content. I say “maybe” because depending on how you set up the compiler later you still can output files from outside the draft folder.īut for now let’s just say the way you think of the draft folder is, it is what will become your output document.įor that reason you can only import text documents into the draft folder. The Draft FolderĮvery Scrivener project has one draft folder and this is where you put all the documents that you (maybe) want to have in your output file. There are a couple of important things that you need to know in order to use the binder effectively. That means, you can have several documents in one project and depending on how you set them up, you can export, or rather “compile” them differently in order to get different outputs. As you might already know, Scrivener is a so called nonlinear writing application. The binder is the place where Scrivener stores all the content that you have in your project. In order to see the binder, just go to “Window – Layouts – Default” and you should see the binder on the left side now. In case you can’t see the binder you might be using a custom layout template. The binder is this narrow window on the left side of the interface that holds all your content files. In this article were going to have a closer look at Scrivener’s binder.