Conventions Used in This Book

This book is not a philosophical work on the theory and value of writing software. In my house, that kind of book would be a doorstop.

No, this book is a hands-on, get-to-work teacher on the page. So, to try out any of the actions described, you have to get your hands on the keyboard and mouse (or trackpad).

With that in mind, you need to have a few skills:

Clicking: You need to know how to click, double-click, and right-click with your mouse or trackpad. Right-clicking opens up a whole new world of contextual menus that apply to whatever you’re working on. Also called a secondary click, you can Control-click on the Mac if your mouse isn’t set up to right-click.

Drag and drop: You’ll be dragging things around a lot in this book — but I promise nothing heavy. Dragging is accomplished by clicking an object and holding the mouse button down while moving the pointer on the screen. You drop by letting go of the mouse button.

Don’t know how to drag with a trackpad? While hovering the pointer over the selected items, click the trackpad and hold it down while using another finger to drag the items where you want them to go. (I usually click with my thumb and drag with my index finger, but use whatever feels comfortable to you.)

To make reading easier, you’ll see some of the following conventions used throughout the book:

A keyboard shortcut is represented like this: ⌘+V. This text means that you press and hold the ⌘ key and type the letter V, then release both keys.

Some keyboard shortcuts are combinations of more than two keys, such as Shift+⌘+S. For this one, press and hold Shift and ⌘, and then type the letter S. Then release all three keys.

Menu commands are written like Project⇒New Text, which tells you to click Project to open the Project menu and choose New Text from that menu.

Web addresses appear like www.literatureandlatte.com .

When I want to show you a message or text that appears in the editing portion of Scrivener, it looks like this: Bob didn’t know what to do next. Should he buy a gun or a beer?

When I’m directing you to type specific text, it appears in bold. For example, I might tell you to type Bob didn’t know what to do next.

Windows users, have no fear. Although Scrivener was originally created for the Mac — and at this time, the Mac version is still the most advanced — much of this book still applies to the Windows version, too.

For more on the key differences between Scrivener for Mac and Scrivener for Windows, check out Chapter 1.