Synchronising with Index Card for iOS |
Index Card for the iPad and iPhone is a corkboard and outlining app that was partly inspired by Scrivener. It allows you to create projects comprising index cards (each of which holds a title, synopsis, and main text, just like Scrivener’s index cards) which can be moved around and edited on a virtual corkboard, or in a list view resembling Scrivener’s outliner. It is therefore an ideal companion application, and using Scrivener’s “Sync with Index Card for iOS” feature you can package up parts of your Scrivener project for editing and restructuring in Index Card on the iOS.
The synchronisation process involves creating a collection in Scrivener, saving it as an .indexcard file that can be read by Index Card, and later updating the collection in Scrivener from the updated .indexcard file written out by Index Card after you have made changes on the go. There are therefore four steps involved in syncing with Index Card:
Because syncing with Index Card relies on Dropbox, which is a service that allows you to sync files between different devices that has a free option. Before you begin, you will need to ensure that you have Dropbox installed on your computer. You can download the desktop version of Dropbox here:
You will of course also need Index Card installed on your iPad. You can find out more about Index Card here:
http://www.denvog.com/iphone/IndexCard
Index Card projects consist of a single stack of index cards that can be moved around on a corkboard. Because Index Card expects a flat list of cards, it is not possible to sync the entire structure of a Scrivener project, or even all of the contents of the Draft folder, which will most likely contain documents inside folders several levels deep.
For this reason, the Collections feature is used to sync with Index Card. The Collections feature allows you to maintain different flat lists of any documents in the project, and which can be ordered however you wish. You should thus create a collection before you sync with Index Card. After editing your project in Index Card, you can easily assign your new arrangement of documents to the binder.
To create a collection, first select the documents you wish to take to Index Card in the binder. Next, click on the "Collections" icon in the toolbar to reveal the collections pane if it is not already visible (or select "Show Collections" from the View ▸ Collections
menu). Finally, click on the "Add Collection" button:
A new collection will be created that contains the documents you had selected. You can rename the collection to anything you like, but something meaningful such as "Index Card Sync" might be a good idea. (You can change the colour of the collection by double-clicking on the colour chip in its tab when the collection is active.)
To add other documents to the your collection, you can just drag them from the binder onto the collection tab:
We have now set up a collection ready for syncing with Index Card. The next step is to create a file in our Dropbox folder that Index Card will be able to read. To do so, use File ▸ Sync ▸ with Index Card for iOS...
. The following sheet will appear:
Once you have everything set up, click on Create or Update Index Card File...
.
The “Save As” panel will appear, and it should automatically point to the “IndexCard” folder inside your Dropbox folder. Index Card creates the “IndexCard” subfolder in Dropbox whenever you sync, so if you haven’t saved any files from Index Card yet, it may not exist. If it doesn’t, create it yourself—navigate to your Dropbox folder, click on “New Folder”, and name the new folder “IndexCard” (with no space). You will need to use this folder, otherwise Index Card will not see your exported files.
Choose a name for the .indexcard file (or use the default one that has been entered automatically) and click on “Save”. At this point, an .indexcard file will be saved into the Dropbox/IndexCard folder, and the sync sheet will close. You are now ready to fire up your device and edit your index cards on the go.
To open the .indexcard file on your iPad or iPhone, follow these instructions:
Copy from Dropbox
You should now be see the .indexcard file you loaded listed in the main project list. The title of the Index Card project will be the title of your Scrivener project with the name of the collection you synced in brackets.
You can now move the cards around, edit their titles and synopses, and create new cards, just as you would in any Index Card project.
When you get back to your computer, you’ll want to update your Scrivener project with the changes you have made in Index Card. To do this, you’ll first need to update the .indexcard file in the Dropbox/IndexCard folder, as follows:
Click on the “Send” button in Index Card and select “Copy to Dropbox” from the list that appears, using the .indexcard format option.
File ▸ Sync ▸ with Index Card for iOS...
again. The collection we chose to sync should already be selected for us in the pop-up button.The collection in your Scrivener project should immediately be updated to reflect the changes you made on your mobile device—the order will be changed if you moved things around, the titles and synopses of any documents you edited will be updated, and any new index cards you created will appear as new documents in the collection. Additionally, when you return to the binder, you will find any new documents that were created have been placed in a folder below the Research folder, which will be named using the title of the collection followed by “Unsorted” in parentheses.
If you deleted any index cards in Index Card on the device, they will be removed from the collection in Scrivener but will not be deleted from the binder.
Collections exist in parallel to the binder, allowing you to gather disparate documents from all over the binder in arbitrary lists in any order you wish. If you've spent a lot of time in Index Card on the iPad rearranging the cards and finding their most effective order, at some point you will want to take that arrangement to the binder rather than having it sectioned off in a collection. This is easy to do, and there are several ways of doing it. Here are the easiest:
With the collection visible, select all of the documents in the collection list:
Then, either:
Ctrl-click on the selection, select "Move To" from the contextual menu that appears, and then choose a folder into which to move the documents. When you do so, the binder will reappear to show the documents in their new location.
or:
Note that in both cases, the collection remains unaffected, and continues to exist separately.
When you next want to take your work with you on the iPad, once more ensure that the collection contains the documents you want to take, and go through the process again, overwriting the old .indexcard file with one generated from your updated collection.
Also note that Scrivener will warn you if you try to sync with an Index Card file that was not created with the selected collection.
Many thanks to the developer of Index Card, "DenVog", who went out of his way to help get syncing to work between Index Card and Scrivener.