You already have a taste of basic features of the corkboard, but Scrivener decided to up the ante and give us more Corkboard functionality with the Freeform Corkboard (only available on the Mac) and Stacked Corkboards
Freeform Corkboard
To access the freeform corkboard, click on the icon that looks like stacked cards at the bottom of the corkboard. You can arrange the cards in any order that you like. You’ll notice that however the order is changed, the order of the folders in the binder remain the same. If you want to change the size of the cards, click on the icon to the right of the stacked card icon and from there window will open and you can fiddle with the size.
I tend to use the Freeform Corkboard to groups images into themes or concepts so I can visualize them better. Here’s an example:
Freeform Corkboard
Once you’ve determined how you want to order the cards, click on the Commit Order at the bottom of the corkboard and a window will open that provides options for how the program interprets your layout.
Freeform Corkboard Commit Order
Under “Start At” click whichever option is appropriate (I chose “Left” and “Top to Bottom”). Once you hit Okay, you’ll see the documents in your binder reordered.
If you don’t like the default corkboard background or the font, you can change that to suit your sense of aesthetics. To make the change go to the file menu click on “Scrivener” scroll down to “Preferences” and select the corkboard icon.
You can customize the color or pattern by going to the “Freeform Background” select “Custom Color” or “Custom Background.” If you select Custom Color the box of crayons will pop up or you can play with the color wheel option. For Custom Background, you can select any photo that you have on file on your Mac. I chose a color from the color wheel. And now my Freeform Corkboard looks like this:
Freeform Corkboard with Blue Background
Stacked Corkboards
The purpose of a stacked corkboard is to view more than one corkboard at time. They’re useful when you want to see the contents of more than one container like a number of chapters or parts in a manuscript.
I think Stacked Corkboards are ideal, for example, if you’ve planned an editorial calendar for a newsletter, a blog, or a magazine. For instance, let’s say that I’ve planned ahead articles for every two weeks, but now I want to see them in their respective corkboards and fiddle around with them. You can do this because in this feature you can move around the cards from one board to another. So if I want to move a planned article from one month to another, I can easily drag them to that corkboard. An important factor to note—stacked corkboards are only available in linear mode. If you’re using the Freeform Corkboard, and you make your folder selections, it automatically defaults to linear.
To activate the Stacked Corkboard function, you can select more than one folder using Cmd-click for Mac; ctrl-click for Windows. Each corkboard is displayed with a divider in between them and they’re shaded differently. At the footer on the right hand side, you can select the card arrangement in either rows, columns or wrapped. I prefer the wrap cards format:
Stacked Corkboards
If you want, you can also number the cards in each corkboard. Go to View->Corkboard Options->Number Per Section. If you decide that you want to add another article for one of the months selected without leaving the corkboard, just hit the Add button in the tool bar.