Say I have a document to which, over time, I’ve added a dozen or two Doc Bookmarks. A few internal, a few external, and perhaps I’m even linking to local files on my hard drive.
I come back to this document a few months later, see the long list of bookmarks in my inspector, and spend lots of time trying to remember why each of these bookmarks were important, what I planned to do with them, what (if any) I need to take, etc.
It would be handy if a descriptive field or note field were available per bookmark, which gave me the opportunity to describe why I added this bookmark.
ETA: A workaround for this is to use a dummy External Bookmark to hold descriptive notes. Add an External Bookmark above the document bookmark, write the descriptive notes in its Title field, and leave the URL empty. You end up with something like this;
Yup, I still sorely miss being able to jot down why a link exists, like we could do in the first versions of Scrivener. The sidebar editor was a huge upgrade for “references”, but the list itself took a hit. I’ve always had it on the list to give this area more thought. I think there are things we could do better on a number of counts. Right now Bookmarks is something that has unparalleled pros over tools that offer linkages between objects in their systems, but it also has significant cons that most other tools do not struggle with.
Two other workarounds to consider:
Use external document links. Since it is a URL and not an internal bookmark you can call it whatever you want. You don’t get to see and edit it in the sidebar, but it otherwise works similar to an internal link. (Not a good approach for those that see the project name or path change periodically.)
Document Notes: again you lose the sidebar editor, but the freeform text field in the other tab is a natural area for listing links to things that need to have a little said about them.
I used the latter for a while, but as I started using bookmarks more and more it became awkward having to switch between tabs for some links but not others (since back-links go there).
Both good points Amber and another trick you could use is to use Comments and reserve one comment color for bookmark notes and this could be edited as add more without crowding the note section of the inspector.
