I encountered this with a couple of projects. I often copy content from one project into another by using drag and drop. Duplicate, click-drag, switch windows, drop. I’ve been known to do this with several documents at a time, because they’re approximately the content I want, and simply need a few tweaks in presentation.
Once encountering this, I made a couple of bare Fiction projects using the default fiction template. I named a scene in each one, with some letters in each scene. (“This is Scene 1”, “This is Scene 2.”) Then I tried to drag and drop from one to the other.
If I drop onto any part of Manuscript, nothing happens. This was not expected.
Okay. I created a new folder, on the same level as Manuscript. Tried dragging/dropping there. A new Untitled folder is created, but it is completely empty. None of the content is copied.
The same thing happens when I drop on to another folder, such as Front Matter/Manuscript. an empty and Untitled folder is created.
Import files should technically work. However, unless I know the directory name of the content I want to copy, this is difficult. The new project directory structure makes it difficult to find the piece of content I might want. I’m not entirely sure how to discover the technical details of a particular scene (its path, for example). I chose one randomly with a content.rtf file, and importing it did work. However, finding the right one means sifting through each file, and when there’s a project with hundreds of scenes, that takes a long time. In a project with thousands of scenes, it’s not an acceptable expenditure of time.
Import project does nothing. Perhaps this is not implemented yet?
Creating each scene as new, and copying content does work. However, if I want to copy a hundred scenes, this is also a time sink.
It would be better if drag and drop from one project to another were to be implemented.
We can still drag docs en masse from the Binder and drop them into a Windows folder. And from the Windows folder, drag them into our next project. The doc titles may not come through perfectly, with punctuation especially likely to be stripped, because of character restrictions in filenames. It’s still much easier than digging into Scrivener’s directory scheme for a draggable doc, and we’d lose unique doc titles entirely by that approach.
“The Draft folder (also called Manuscript, Screenplay, or something else depending on which template you chose when you created the project) can only hold text documents. Image files, PDFs, web pages, and other non-text type files must be stored somewhere outside of the Draft folder (e.g. the Research folder, or a folder you create).”
There were NO images in these scenes. SIMPLE TEXT. One held “This is Scene 1.” The other, “This is scene 2.” Brand new scenes, created just for this test, because I’d noticed this problem.
That such a work around is needful says this is a serious bug. It’s not quite a dealbreaker, but it does make the software less useful. That I need to have a special directory to accomplish copy-and-paste by drag-and-drop is extremely annoying.
Drag and drop between the Binder areas of open projects should work. If it doesn’t, that is a bug and should be reported as such. All potential workarounds are just that, workarounds.
RW Franz: Sorry for the late reply, but could you give me a bit more information on this? Were all of the projects you found this one created from template? And were any of them upgraded projects or were they all created in the Beta?
All created in the beta. All from one template, I’m pretty sure (fiction novel, standard template).
The reason I noticed it is I was using a different template, tried to copy between two open projects, and couldn’t. That template is huge, with all kinds of stuff in it, and it was upgraded.
I’ll make a video showing the issue, and post it in reply to this.
Saving the copy-from project and reopening doesn’t help.
The copy-to project was created in the current beta (2908)
The copy-from project was likely created in an early version of 1.9, and may have been created in the linux beta in its short life. It was recently converted by opening it in Scriv 2908.
Closing every instance of Scrivener and re-opening the projects seems to eliminate the problem (this is why it’s hard to duplicate; once you reopen the project, the problem disappears).
But, ALSO, from the backup copy made by Beta, I could not reproduce the behavior, so I thought it might have something to do with the template from which I made the new project, and I was right. That template causes this issue.
I make a new project using that template (which was converted, I’m pretty sure – I may have converted a file and saved as template, though).
I CANNOT then drag and drop from another file to that project and have the contents appear. A blank folder appears in the binder, as seen in the short video.
Not sure what’s wrong with the project template. It’s sizable, and I’m going to rebuild it (now that it’s a problem). I’m guessing you’d like a look at it, so here’s the link (zipped):
I took the template in %APPDATA%, zipped it, and uploaded it. The template itself is going to be rebuilt, though. The issue is easily resolved, but if people have homebuilt templates and convert them, they may run into this issue.
Voila. I’m sure it’s a bug, and I think it’s in the conversion process. I will do some more testing.