No apparent way to add carriage returns to the title text. When I paste in text with carriage returns, doesn’t expand and doesn’t take all the text. You clearly are seeing different behavior on Microsoft Windows than I see on Apple macOS. I expected my Mac to behave with these Title cells you see, but apparently not. Behavior probably buried deep in the OS.
I’m on macOS 13.0.1 with Scivener 3.2.3
Oh. That’s too bad…
Perhaps try line-breaks ?
That then also mean that there could be a problem for a cross platform project.
Tired 'em all (Return key on its own, Return with cmd, Return with option, Return with control, Enter with shift). And copy/paste from BBedit.
AH.
That doesn’t work for me either…
You need to PASTE it.
Write a few lines in your editor, with a carriage return at the end of each line.
Then copy the whole to the snapshot’s title.
?
This time paste from BBEdit puts all the text in, but the cell does not expand.
I don’t know what BBedit is.
Try from Scrivener’s editor, maybe.
BBEdit is a mainline well respected text editor. https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
Tried in Scrivener too. Text from outside pasted in seems to get to cell, but the cell does not expand to show it.
To close out the thread, @Vincent_Vincent and I in “messages” pursued, and it seems that only in Scrivener Windows do the cells in the table list of Snapshots do any sort of word-wrapping or expansion. Scrivener macOS does not enlarge the cell if warranted. Bug? Dunno.
It doesn’t wrap in the Windows’ version either.
Only pasting a carriage return spawns a new line, making the cell taller.
Bug in the Mac version ? I don’t think so.
Pretty sure that this behavior in the Windows version (although useful to some extent) is not intended by the devs. Just some sort of enjoyable fluke.
[EDIT] I just tried with a line feed instead of a carriage return, and that works too.
This isn’t helpful after you’ve made the snapshot, but what about putting an inline annotation at the top of the document you’re about to create a snapshot of? There’s a check-box in the compile window that will strip out any annotations on the compiled output, so you don’t have to worry about leaving them there.
or put info in note section which snapshot is one you want. That will not be included in compile and no limits on note info.
Thanks! Some thoughts:
-I now also just give the snapshot a meaningful title. But on my end I can’t get line breaks to work. Also not if I copy paste.
-Someone suggested using notes, but those aren’t saved when you take a snapshot.
-An inline annotation at the top was something I also considered. But then you have to write your note BEFORE you take the snapshot. And often I remember what I want to say about the draft version after I’ve started editing it and I’ve already taken the snapshot. It also would mean you can’t change or edit your note after the fact which I often feel the need to do.
Conclusion: the feature I want is missing in Scrivener. I will start looking for another program, I really need a feature like this. I’ll also post this in ‘feature requests’.
I’ve already changed the tag on your post, so there’s no need to add another thread for this same thing.
I feel Scrivener already has plentiful tools for making remarks about snapshots. The inline annotation method works great if you know why you are taking the snapshot, but as you note it’s a bit unwieldy if you tend to think of things you want to say about the revision later on.
The overall larger problem that you are looking at improving is something I’ve given a lot of thought and refinement to in my own workflow. I often have a need for tracking a specific edit across multiple binder items, to have a place where I can jot down notes on that edit, as a process itself, have a list of what has been changed, and be able to look up snapshots that were related to that edit as well. I also want that to be something permanent, that I can look up years from now and have all of my notes under my fingertips, all of the snapshots I made, all of the sections in the binder that were edited because of a change, right there in a list.
I’ve written these thoughts, and my methods, in more detail in this post.
Once you’ve read through that and maybe experimented with the idea a bit: do we need more interface and features to put these notes on the snapshots themselves? Eh… maybe? But I don’t think it would add a whole lot to what we can already freely do, and with likely better tools than anything a little comment sticky note or whatever would give us. A feature which does nothing other than that one thing is something we do try to stay away from in Scrivener. We prefer to make features that can do a million things, because that’s how you end up doing stuff like what I described in the previous post. There is no “revision tracking system” in the software, not even slightly. But with the many freeform, simple, and interconnected features in the software we can make a system that I would dare say rivals anything elsewhere that was built more to purpose (and thus does very little else).
Thank you Amber, the post was awesome and gave me a new way of looking at my revisions after I complete the first draft of a second book in a trilogy I am working on.
You are also right that Scrivener allows everyone to take any method and tweak it with the myriad of tools in Scrivener.
I intend to use your technique during my revision process with some tweaks. One is using a symbol to identify the edit and including it in the Revision folder, each ticket and snapshot title, making for easy searches and buildable collections. I will start with !Title and go from there.
Thank you for inspiring me to do more with scrivener.
Thanks Amber - I’ll take a look at that post. Perhaps your methods can help me refine mine.
So far, my method is just to create a new document each time I want to make a major change to a draft chapter. I create a folder in the binder for the chapter, and then end up having about 20 or more documents called ‘draft-1, draft-2, etc’. I just use duplicate to create the new version, and then I can use the ‘note’ function in the inspector to clarify which version of the chapter this is. I can edit the notes ‘after the fact’, and I can easily cycle through different drafts in the binder, and immediately see the notes for each as I cycle through them. In terms of functionality, this is what I need for my brain to relax and trust the process. I find using snapshots just gives me brain freeze. I lose track of what the difference is between the snapshots, I can give them a title to help me identify them later on but that’s about it. It’s also harder to cycle through them and quickly open one up and see what’s in it. It’s possible but it’s slightly less intuitve then having different drafts in different documents.
The only downside of my method is this: It’s now impossible to keep track of the overall word count of the total book. For each chapter there are different drafts, and those all add to the overall word count. At the moment my book is too large, and I need to constantly check the overall word count to see if I’ve managed to cut it down to publishable levels. Since snapshots don’t count for the word count, I feel like I need to just have one document per chapter, and then use snapshots for the different versions/drafts. It’s just that … well - it blocks my creative flow to work like that.
I name the snapshots as edits, first edit, edit with prowriter’s aid etc. Can add in note section any needed info on edit and are lined up by date and include date and time info. you can always go back to earlier edit via copy and paste of snapshot and don’t have endless folders and also maintain accurrate word count. I have some files with 6-7 edits. if have major story rewrite can label as such and if copy and paste into snapshot title with returns between text lines can get a multi line snap shot title
ex. cut and paste below and would have 3 line snapshot title
This is POV x edit with more drama
Antagonist y is trying to interfere
added more sensory info, need to add conflict.
if copied this could paste all this info into a snapshot title
repeated and did 6 lines of text for a snapshot title- see pic
To address this while keeping all your drafts together, one option would be marking the older drafts to be excluded from compile. That would then also let you exclude their word count in both the project Statistics and in the project targets. A similar option would be setting up a compile group that filters out all but the current draft, e.g. if all old drafts have a certain label or status, they could be excluded from compile based on that, which in turn would again prevent them from adding their word count in statistics and targets if you have those set to only consider documents included in the compile group.
For the first option, you can easily toggle the “include in compile” setting on and off from the little page icon in the right of the editor footer or set it for multiple items at once in the outliner with the “Include in Compile” column visible. Select all the items you want to edit, then Opt-click one checkbox in the column to deselect it; the change will apply to all the selected items.
For compile filtering, you can click the funnel icon to the right of the compile group Contents name in the main compile window to see and set your various options. The funnel icon will turn blue to let you know the filter is enabled, hiding some items from the content list there in the window.
Re:Goaliedad
Thanks! But I cannot for the life of me replicate this. If I copy-paste text with linebreaks into the snapshot title, it just takes the first line and makes that the title. I’m on 3.2.2. on Mac.
Re:MimeticMouton
Brilliant! That could actually be a workable solution for me. I never thought of the link between compile and word count, i.e. that the way to exclude things from word count is to exclude them from compile. And you’re right, you can very easily exclude docs from compile with the little document icon in the footer. Would you believe I never really even noticed that that little icon was there? This does prove that Scrivener is ALMOST infinitely flexible. 
I still think having the ability to attach a note to a snapshot would be a really useful feature. Once you’re in the ‘final draft’ stage of a text, there is something wonderful about just having documents for your chapters in compile, and not endless draft versions which make things look cluttered. If you could use snapshots for your drafts, but could manage these more easily / intuitively, you’d have peace of mind AND a final draft which is starting to look neat and organised. A better snapshot manager right in the inspector would add to that. How about a mac finder style option to press spacebar and immediately have a snapshot open in a separate window that is larger and has a bigger font? Press spacebar again and it disappears. And notes could also be added in the inspector I think without things looking too cluttered. You’d want to see the notes pane even more than the content of the snapshot, which you’d want to only open up anyway if you’d really want to see what’s in it (which you could for example do with a keyboard shortcut like spacebar). Having the ability to see some kind of synopsis of the snapshot, or a note, would be much more useful than seeing the first few lines of the snapshot, which are not likely to give you very useful info anyway.
sorry to hear, never knows what will not cross the systems intact
