Index Card for the iPad 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 and synopsis, 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 iPad" feature you can package up parts of your Scrivener project for editing and restructuring in Index Card on the iPad.

The synchronisation process involves creating a collection in Scrivener, saving it as an .indexcard file that can be read by Index Card on the iPad, and later updating the collection in Scrivener from the updated .indexcard file written out by Index Card after you have made changes on the iPad. There are therefore four steps involved in syncing with Index Card:

1. Creating a Collection to hold the documents to sync.
2. Saving an .indexcard file to your Dropbox folder.
3. Opening, editing and saving the .indexcard file in Index Card on the iPad.
4. Updating the Collection in Scrivener with any changes you have made.

Note: Because syncing with Index Card relies on Dropbox, before you begin, you will need to ensure that you have Dropbox installed on both your computer and your iPad. (Dropbox is a service that allows you to sync files between different devices, which has a free option.) You can download the desktop version of Dropbox here:

http://www.getdropbox.com

The iPad version can be downloaded from the App Store.

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

1. Creating a Collection

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.)

Note: If you wish to include the contents of an entire folder in the collection, select the folder and hold down the Option key down while clicking on the "Add Collection" button.

To add other documents to the your collection, you can just drag them from the binder onto the collection tab:

2. Saving the Index Card File to Dropbox

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, go to the File menu in Scrivener and select Sync > with Index Card for iPad... The following sheet will appear:

First, choose the collection you created in step 1 from the "Collection" pop-up button.

By default, Scrivener only syncs the titles and synopses of documents with Index Card for outlining, but if you want to sync the main text too, tick "Sync main text with Index Card notes". You will then be able to edit the text of your documents on the back of the cards in Index Card. Ticking this enables the other two checkboxes. If "Take snapshot before updating main text" is ticked, Scrivener will take a snapshot of the text of any document it updates - it's a good idea to leave this ticked. If "Convert plain text paragraph spacing" is checked, Scrivener will add extra spacing between the paragraphs of the main text in Index Card, which can be useful given that Index Card is plain-text only.

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).

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 iPad and edit your index cards on the go.

3. Editing the File in Index Card on the iPad

To open the .indexcard file on your iPad, ensure that you have both Dropbox and Index Card installed, and then follow these instructions:

1. Open the Dropbox app on your iPad.
2. In the Dropbox app, navigate to the .indexcard file you saved in the previous step.
3. Select the .indexcard file so that it opens in the Dropbox preview pane. It will open as an XML document (plain text with a lot of greater-than and less-than symbols). We're not worried about this, though.
4. Click on the "Open In" button in the top-right of Dropbox - you will be given the option of opening the file in Index Card:



5. Click on "Index Card" to open the project in the Index Card app. You should now be presented with the documents from your Scrivener collection as index cards on Index Card's own corkboard:

(Note that 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.

4. Updating the Collection in Scrivener

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:

1. Click on the "Send" button in the top-right of the header bar in Index Card and select "Share via Dropbox" from the list that appears:



2. At this point, Index Card, detecting that the file already exists, may ask you whether you wish to overwrite the existing file or save using a different file name. Choose to overwrite the existing file.
3. Now, back in Scrivener, go to File > Sync > with Index Card for iPad... again. The collection we chose to sync should already be selected for us in the pop-up button.
4. This time, choose "Update Collection from Index Card File...", because we want to update our project with the changes we made in Index Card.
5. The standard Open panel will appear, and the .indexcard file that you edited should already be selected for you. If not, select it. Then click "Open".

The collection in your Scrivener project should immediately be updated to reflect the changes you made on your iPad - 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. (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.) Note that if you deleted any index cards in Index Card on the iPad, they will be removed from the collection in Scrivener but will not be deleted from the binder.

Committing Rearrangements to 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:

1. With the collection visible, select all of the documents in the collection list:



2. 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:

• Drag the selected documents onto the "Binder" tab in the Collections pane and hold them there. After a second, the collections list will disappear to be replaced by the binder, and you can drag and drop the documents wherever you want to place them.

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.

Note: It is possible to sync more than one collection in a project with Index Card - each collection will appear in Index Card as a separate project. However, bear in mind that if any documents appear in more than one collection, any edits you make to them in one Index Card project could get overridden were you to later sync with an Index Card project created from another collection that contains some of the same documents.

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.

Thank You...

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.