Problem Symptoms
Pasting a link generated from amazon associates does not generate an active link.
Sequence:
On the appropriate amazon page, click on the “link to this page” and generate a link in the modal window.
Highlight and copy the link
In Scrivener highlight the link text
use the format menu to create a web link
paste, cmd V, the amazon link information into the link field.
the result appears to be that there is nothing pasted.
However, if you click OK, the link text appears as a link and if you mouse over it then the tooltip shows the link.
I’m guessing that the problem is that Scrivener is expecting a URL, as opposed to an anchor tag and hence is not interpreting the code as a link?
Does anyone have any insights on this subject and/or know if its possible to insert amazon associate links within scrivener text.
Scrivener uses the standard OS X web link sheet at the moment, so you should see the same behaviour in TextEdit. I haven’t been able to test this as I have failed to find any “link to this page” links on Amazon, probably because I’m not signed up as an affiliate, but it couldn’t just be that there is a return character at the top or bottom of the link, could it? If so, the text might be pasted in correctly but scrolled so that you can only see the blank line - if you cursor up or down, you may be able to see it.
All the best,
Keith
Correct, amazon associates have an additional navigation bar that drops down to allow you to make links to specific products.
Previously I tried using the delete key to remove any “return” characters that might be in the line but no link text was revealed. However, after reading your thoughts I used the arrow keys and found that the link text is there. I went to both ends of the link and used the delete key but there was no sign of return characters.
A typical link includes both an anchor tag and an image tag.
I assume therefore that Textedit, and hence Scrivener, is not able to interpret these two tags.
Yes, it sounds like Amazon is generating a bit of spot-code in HTML that you can easily paste into a web page or blog post, not a pure URL link. Scrivener expects just the URL, not all of the HTML code around the URL. I don’t have an affiliate account either, so I cannot produce a verbatim example, but if you have something that looks a bit like this:
What you want to copy is just the part inside the quotes, following the href= bit in the anchor element. So in this example, amazon.com/?lots_of_other_stuff
Since both TextEdit and Scrivener are rich text editors and not HTML editors, you are correct in assuming that they will not know how to handle image and anchor elements as code.