From what I understand, the MacOS version of scrivener has something called Wiki Links, that allow you to create quick hyperlinks to other documents simply by writing the name of the document between brackets. Writing [[Bob Smith]] should link to Bob Smiths character document when you click the created link.
I tried it out, and couldn’t seem to make it work, so Im wondering if I am just misunderstanding how they work, or if they just aren’t fully implemented into the public RC yet.
Have you turned the feature on yet? It is an opt-in feature since it might be very confusing if you don’t know to expect it. You’ll find the setting in the Corrections tab, in the data detection section.
This is AWESOME! Thank you for including it in the beta. It must be so new as to not be in the Tutorial or Manual yet. Yet. I can see all sorts of uses for it. This just made my day!
Yup! It will be in the next user manual revision. I thought it was in this one, but it is all a bit of an ongoing process.
It is easily on my favourite feature list, because I link a lot, and there is no better way to do it than from the keyboard. A good trick: use the Edit ▸ Completions ▸ Complete Document Title shortcut to decrease typing. Dragging search results out of the Quick Search tool is probably the second most used way I create links, and superior when you have a lot of section titles that start with “The” or similar.
If what you type between the brackets isn’t an existing item title, then yes, it will create a new item wherever you chose to place it. If there is a matching title, then it simply links to what already existed. So while it isn’t a true wiki link in the sense of being a passive link to a non-existent thing until you click on it and type, it operates in a similar fashion up front. You don’t need to know whether the thing you wish to reference exists yet, or not.
No idea what you mean by that, sorry. Snapshots are Ctrl+5 as always, and have nothing to do with linking.
You may already know this, but other readers may not. Wikipedia is not the first wiki, it’s just perhaps the most famous. Wikis are pretty well-known for having this kind of simple-to-create link behavior, and as Ioa says, the traditional behavior is that if the linked title doesn’t exist, the link becomes a placeholder for a page to be created at a future date.
For writers who may be using wikis to document their worldbuilding, world bible, etc., this is completely invaluable because you can be creating links to topics that don’t yet exist, so you can go back to them afterwards and then create the new page and all existing references to it automatically become active links.
For me (and, I suspect, man yothers) this makes the use of a separate wiki product less of a need – I can now have a Scrivener project open to document my world bible and use wiki-style links to tie it all together, creating new (blank) pages as required, but still have Scriv’s full power to (say) compile and export only a portion of the document to a collaborator. And then I can have a second project for the active novel I’m working on in that world. As far as I know you can’t use wiki-style links to refer to material in separate projects, but I’m personally okay with that for now.
For those curious about where WikiWiki (the original term) all began, Ward Cunningham’s original concept is still around, though in more of a museum state than a live project, as I understand it. I remember contributing to this thing, back in the day—but most of all, finding myself enthralled by the concept!
A simple question from a simple mind, one which is not yet using the beta: are the links created by this wiki process the same as Scrivener links, i.e., links to other files within a Scrivener project? IOW, is this a way to create Scrivener links without taking one’s hands off the keyboard?
I’m working in the editor and type [[Jack and Jill]].
When I enter the second ‘]’, one of the following things happens:
If a binder item with the exact name Jack and Jill exists (case sensitive), then Scrivener transforms [[Jack and Jill]] into a Scrivener link.
Or
If no binder item exists with that exact name, then a Link to Document window launches, same as from pressing Ctrl+G, Ctrl+D, but with Jack and Jill entered for you in the Title field,
It’s definitely a cool feature, but you need to have exact spelling of your binder item names handy for it to work.
Thanks, Jim, and many thanks to whoever thought of this and implemented it! Hands-on-KB is my preferred mode of working, so this sounds great. Actually, I thought Alt+Click/Drag to create a link was very cool, but this will be better. Assuming relatively short names in the Binder, at least; for some of mine, it will become a cost-benefit analysis to decide between mousing and typing.
