That, actually should not have happened! When two documents are merged together, their snapshot lists are merged as well, so for instance if you have this data:
scene a
[ Snapshot: bad rewrite ]
[ Snapshot: Untitled (Final Draft)]
scene b
[ Snapshot: Untitle (First Draft)]
The merged result would be:
scene a
[ Snapshot: bad rewrite ]
[ Snapshot: Untitled (Final Draft)]
[ Snapshot: Untitle (First Draft)]
But you are right in that the comparison feature does lose a bit of its usefulness when a lot of splitting and merging is done as a regular part of the editing process.
I would suggest if one is going to âexplodeâ a section into paragraphs for deeper control, I would make sure there is a âmasterâ document occupying the top slot (even if it is just empty) that contains the original snapshots for this section. Then, when all of the child paragraphs are merged back into it, they will retain the original snapshot list and the comparison feature might even be useful if the original structure is somewhere there.
Hmm, I wonder what I did. Itâs probable that I am misremembering the details - it was over 18 months ago now. Itâs good to know for future reference (and apologies for misrepresenting Scriv).
Nice suggestion. Could be a little problematic for my random âthis section is getting too long, itâs really two ideas â actually make that 3, but one of them belongs three sections up â better splitâ way of thinking. But for the more considered edits this could work well.
Thanks so much for the suggestions, all. Please keep them coming! Iâll try to remember to let everyone know what worked and what didnât after we get through the manuscript.
Just an update here: at first, the footnote exchange didnât work at all and I couldnât figure out why. Answer: he was sending the MSWord chapters as .doc files, and neither Scrivener nor Pages nor TextEdit would display the footnotes. When I asked him to re-send as .rtf, the footnotes appeared like magic! Lesson (which is probably written somewhere in the user manual but if not, should be): when dealing with MS Word files that have footnotes, always save them as rtf before importing into Scrivener.
Will let you know if we encounter any other problems, like when I add my own footnotes and export the whole thing back to him. That may be a week or so, so I might as well ask now: should I export the edited files as rtf or docx for him to work with in Word? Iâm assuming the former. Thanks again for all the help!
RTF is Scrivenerâs native format, so that will always be the fastest and most reliable. However if you are using the improved converters, and Java is installed correctly on the system, then .doc/x should be quite fine too (just a little slow to create). If those are disabled for whatever reason, then Scrivener will fall back to using OS Xâs .doc/x converters, which arenât that good. As for Pages, it canât really read RTF files fully, and it will drop footnotes, so you do need a .doc/x file to work with it (somewhat ironically, since Apple committed to making RTF its core format and it doesnât even bother to fully support basic features like footnotes). Whether you get that by exporting from Scrivener as RTF and using Word to make the .doc/x file, or get the improved converters working in Scrivener is up to you.
P.S. TextEdit doesnât even have a footnote feature, so it will drop them (and other formatting too).
Sometimes I find the select all with similar formatting function to be a bit finicky, but this is definitely the way to go. Now, if only Scrivener was a little better at table formatting, that would reduce my 20 minute job to a 10 minute job.
