Documents, folders, notes
A document is a piece of the book: a scene, a chapter, a section of a thesis. Folders hold documents, like parts and chapters. A note is working material (characters, places, sources, ideas) and stays out of the book.
- New document, next to the selected one
- ⌘N
- New folder
- ⌥⌘N
- New note
- ⌃⌘N
The + at the top of the sidebar and the folder icon beside it do the same. In the Novel template, whatever you create inside Notes starts out as a note.
Reordering and renaming
Drag documents and folders to change their order or move them to another folder; drag files from the Finder to copy them into the project. Return, or a double-click, renames. Everything else, like Duplicate and Open Beside, is in the right-click menu, or under … when you hover over a row.
A document’s name is its file name. As long as it is called “New Document”, its first line shows in gray under the name. When you move or rename a document, the links and images in other documents follow it.
In the text, a right-click offers Split Here: from the caret’s line down, the text goes into a new document right below, named after its first heading, and the footnotes go where they are called. With several documents chosen in the sidebar, Merge Documents puts them one after the other into the first and sends the others to the Trash, where you can restore them.
A long document, say a novel written in a single file, splits in one step: in the sidebar a right-click offers Split at Headings, then how far, At Titles (#), At Titles and Headings (##) or Down to Subheadings (###). Each heading becomes a document with its name; the first stays in the document you started from, which takes the name of its heading. The exported book does not change, and Merge Documents puts it all back together.
The book folder
One folder makes the book: Manuscript in the Novel template, Text in Essay or Thesis, the whole project in Empty. Its documents follow one another in sidebar order, and notes stay out. To choose another, select a folder and turn on It’s the book folder in the inspector; to leave a document out, turn off In the book.
Below the tree, In the Document lists the headings of the open document and Book Contents the parts, documents and headings of the whole book: a click takes you there. Both follow your writing; Book and Document, in their header, switch from one to the other. The line with a grip between the tree and the titles drags to give more room to one or the other, and stays where you leave it.
From a Word document
File › Import from Word… adds the chapters of a .docx document at the end of the book: one document for each chapter, with its title, and a folder for each part when the book has them. Italics, bold, quotes, lists, footnotes and images come along; Word’s comments become comments and its tracked changes suggestions, to decide in Review. To start a project from a document, in the Library: New… › Project from Word…. One ⌘Z in the sidebar removes everything that came in.
From Scrivener
File › Import from Scrivener… brings a .scriv project into Finis: its Draft (Manuscript, in recent templates) goes at the end of the book, with folders as parts and chapters and texts as documents; the rest, such as characters, places and research with its PDFs and pictures, goes into Notes. Synopses stay synopses, labels and keywords become tags, statuses find Finis’s own, and the notes of a document become a note about it. In the text, italics, bold, headings and lists stay; footnotes stay footnotes, and comments and annotations become comments, to resolve in Review. To start from Scrivener, in the Library: New… › Project from Scrivener…. One ⌘Z in the sidebar removes everything that came in.
From Ulysses, Bear or iA Writer
Export the text as TextBundle or TextPack, then in Finis choose File › Import from TextBundle…: each bundle becomes a document at the end of the book, with its name, and the pictures go into Media, with the links following them. You can choose more than one; dragged into the sidebar, they go where you drop them. The text comes in as the other app wrote it; a whole book in a single bundle splits into chapters with Split at Headings, from the document’s menu. To start from a TextBundle, in the Library: New… › Project from TextBundle…. One ⌘Z in the sidebar removes everything that came in.
In the Finder
In the Finder, the space bar on a project shows its cover, title, words, statuses, contents and the opening of the book, without opening it.
The Trash
Move to Trash (⌫ in the sidebar) puts documents and folders in Finis’s Trash, at the bottom of the sidebar, where you can restore them. Emptying it moves the files to the Mac’s Trash: Finis never deletes anything for good.