You’re very welcome!
You’re absolutely right, the terminology (sections, chapters etc) can get confusing – in particular, ‘Section’ seems to be used for two different purposes.
Firstly, ‘section’ in its general sense refers to an individual unit, or line, in the Binder. So it can be a folder, or a file, as long as it has its own entry in the Binder. Every unit in the binder has a Section Type, where you tell Scrivener what the purpose of that unit will be.
So, for example, in a novel, you could identify some units as Chapters, some as Scenes, some as a Prologue and so on – and you do this by giving all the scenes the same Section Type. In your example, the Section Type is actually called “Section”, which is confusing…
You can use the Section Type in the Editor, for example by setting up a dynamic search only documents with “Section Type = Scene”.
But it’s mainly used when you come to compile, because then you tell the compiler that you want units of Section Type “This” to all have the same format, while units of Section Type “That” all have a different format – i.e. you assign each Section Type to a specific Section Layout.
That’s essentially it: when you’re writing you identify the different type of elements you’re producing (Section Type), and in the compiler you identify what those different types will look like (Section Layout).
It looks more complicated than it is, because – as you said – some Project Templates use the word “section” both in the category “Section Type” and as a specific example: “Section Type = Section”…
But the truth is the names of the Section Types themselves are irrelevant – you could call them “Bob”, “Ted” and “Alice” if you want, as long as you use the same value for the same type of unit.
To make this a bit clearer, let’s take the example from your post. Here I’m changing the default Section Type “Section” to “Slide” in Project > Project Settings > Section Types
:
It now looks like this in the Outliner:
Now in the compile main dialogue, you have this:
The assign section layouts panel:
As you can see, I’ve used the advanced options dialog I mentioned in the last post to to change the name of the Section Layout to “SLIDE LAYOUT”.
You’re still compiling the same project to the same output format – all we’ve done is make the names a little more meaningful to show how they are used in the editor and compilation.
(NB: You don’t have to change the names at all. Basically: the names of the values of Section Type and Section Layout are just labels – concentrate on what they do and what they look like, rather than the name.)
This use of Section Types and Section Layouts is actualy the source of much of Scrivener’s power – it means you can use exactly the same project for radically different output formats – to an Ebook, to a camera ready paperback and to a manuscript for submission to publishers for example – just by assigning different Section Layouts to the existing Section Types.
HTH.