All Things Links?

Scrivener
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Greetings all, this is my first post to L&L.

Introduction & Salutations: I’m a geek by profession, but I had been spending more and more time working on a novel, which I had been doing in M$ OneNote for a while, but the burdensome process involved therein pretty much killed that fire.

I just recently entered the Mac world (after a 10 year hiatus), and after searching for “OS X Storyboarding” in Google, I came upon Scrivener directly after getting my new Mac up and running. Suffice to say that the fire has been re-lit! :slight_smile:

Keith, Amber: what a product, and what a great job you (and everyone on this forum) are doing to support it. Keep it up, please! :slight_smile:

I’ve been trying to take advantage of all the ‘linking’ features of Scrivener (both for internal and external links), and I don’t have it quite mastered yet - and my geek sense is telling me that there’s probably a little more functionality to it than I’m picking up.

And now, onto the question(s) I had for any/all Scriveners:

I’ve tried searching this forum from a couple of probably bad angles, and I’m not coming up with as much as I’d think the 1000 plus forum folks have to have created… Is there a general FAQ entry (or elsewhere in the forums) that covers all one can do with Internal & External Links in Scrivener?

…Drilling down the question a little more granularly:

  • I’ve no problem linking to folders, texts, etc. from within a text, but I wonder if I can link to a specific place in another text? I.e., I see where I can make a word into a link within a text, but how can I point to that link after I’ve made it?

  • Second, what is the ‘cleanest’ way to pull a web page into a text? I’ve played with various copy/paste methods, mostly using Firefox. The result usually nets me just text, and requires moderate cleanup. Again, my geek sense is telling me that I’m probably not getting the most out of Scrivener here.

** I.e., Is there a way to pull data into a Scrivener text that preserves links / formatting / tables, etc?

** Also, being a Mac n00b, am I silly to be using Firefox for this? Is the Safari integration OS X much better optimized for what I’m trying to do?

…Many thanks in advance to all!

-Geoff

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As for linking to actual spots within a document, no it is not that granular. There is no way to place anchors as you would in a web page. The only way to really do this (in a sense) is to cut up your text a bit more. I’m not sure how much you are doing that, but slicing your text into small parcels is one of the things that Scrivener encourages. The ease at which you can take twenty or whatever scenes and temporarily edit them as a cohesive single document is something unique to the program. With your preferences set up right, in the next version you will be able to click on a container and automatically see the entire text of the contained documents as though they were a single document. So cutting things up a bit more than you would in other programs is not as much of a deficit. This also means your links will be more relevant.

Re: web imports. Definitely using web archives is the most “pure” way to get a web site in. The option for setting that is located in the General tab of Scrivener’s preferences. The only real drawback to using web archives is that you sacrifice editability. If you use the web for a lot of research and are used to editing the HTML to embed your notes, that probably will not be the best solution. But, it will look just like the original web page and the links will work.

Next best is to set that option to convert to text, and use Cmd-Opt-W to import the web page. This will actually convert the page to an RTF file, which means you lose a lot of the original formatting, but links will still work. Nice thing about this method is that you get all the content, and you can freely edit and annotate this content. Be prepared for some pretty fugly looking imports though.

Lastly, for partial imports (grabbing parts of the page via copy and paste), you’ll need to use a browser other than Firefox. Unfortunately, it does not save formatting when copying. Safari moves formatting pretty well between, and Camino probably does too.

As for switching to Safari/Camino. That is more a matter of taste than anything. There are a few little things here and there that mean better system integration with Safari, but if you rely on Firefox extensions (I use several web development tools extensively), you’ll miss them pretty fast in the bare bones Safari. Camino might be a better choice to switch to for the Firefox accustomed, as it has more features, and uses the same Gecko rendering engine (making it a better choice if you do web dev). If you use Cmd-Opt-W though to import into Scrivener, it doesn’t matter what browser you use. Scrivener uses WebKit for all of that.

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Perfect and fast! Thanks much!!! Amber rocks!

-Geoff

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You’re welcome. :slight_smile:

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Yes, Amber. I’ve been using Scr. for almost a year now and I picked up two new tips from you in the past five minutes! So, thanks, Amber, from me too!!!

Alexandria

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Helllo… This is really a great place to be! Talking about literature especially the ones made by brilliant novels…