A different type of link

[KB]

@jfontana

The current way of linking to existing files (as opposed to creating copies of existing documents into your Scrivener project) is a bit cumbersome and the results are kind of “ugly”.

I disagree strongly with this - links are links, and they currently work just as well as in any other application when it comes to making inline links.

some times the documents I want to link are deep into some subdirectory and the resulting link is long and obscure.

But you don’t have to have the whole text in there - use Edit > Add Link and you can add a smaller title that just links to the file, just like regular web links.

Creating the link via drag and drop is problematic as well. If I drag and drop a pdf on the document where I’m adding the links, Scrivener creates an image of the first page of the document and that becomes a bit unmanageable as well.

That’s not a link but an actual imported PDF file. Use Edit > Add Link… instead.

Also, there’s no need to add all your links to a text document - certainly there’s no need to set up a document especially for this. Remember that the references pane of the inspector allows you to create links to any file on disk and access them from the inspector (you can create references applicable just to the current document or to the whole project using Project References).

What would be nice to have is a way to drag and drop documents to the appropriate section of the binder thus creating a link to the document.

Check out the current beta in the beta testing forum, as similar behaviour to this has been added for 2.1 - you can use File > Import > Research Files as Aliases… to achieve almost exactly this.

Best,
Keith