Hi all,
I’m jumping on the Scrivener bandwagon terribly late, given that I switched to a Mac almost three years ago. Nanowrimo and Script Frenzy brought it to my attention, though, and having played around with a couple fiction projects and a script, I’ve now gone ahead and bought it and raved about it to the few other Mac users I know (probably to the point that they wish I’d just can it). The tutorial, web videos, and especially the forum have been wonderful tools to help me get a grasp on how to tweak Scrivener to my style, so thank you all! And thanks, Keith, of course, for this amazing program. I wish I’d known about it years ago; I’d have switched to Mac sooner.
Thus far I’ve only worked on fiction projects with Scrivener, but I’ve got a non-fiction project I want to bring in. I’ve read through a bunch of forum posts about working with PDFs already, so I’m pretty sure I have the basic scenario for how best to do this, but before I begin the process I wanted to see if anyone had other ideas or if I’m missing something. I’m working with a bunch of handwritten notes or old printed materials that are all image PDFs rather than text. While I’d love to be able to convert them, chop them up into Scrivenings, etc., I can’t afford OCR software and it’s really not that crucial. So I just want to figure out the best solution to work with these files in Scrivener. I know I can annotate and highlight them in Preview and bring them in as individual pages, and my plan is to do that and use document notes, keywords, and the synopsis to pull the relevant bits out to be searchable in Scrivener or else to just make a summary or transcription Scrivener document with all the same metadata and just use the document references to link to the PDF.
What I want to make sure I’m not missing is whether there’s any way to search for words in the PDF annotations and comments made in Preview. I haven’t seen anything on this in the forums, so I feel like it’s either clearly impossible and I should know better or it’s clearly so easy I should also know better.
Second, Preview lets you add keywords to PDFs which are searchable via Spotlight. Scrivener seems to be unable to access these keywords (they don’t show up anywhere once I import the PDF, nor do they come up on a search), but apparently the metadata is still with the file, because if I export the PDF again it has retained the original keywords. I suppose that’s just a curiosity with the system, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious.
Lastly (sorry to drag this out so long), when I view a PDF in Scrivener that I haven’t imported, it initially shows the title of the file in the title bar. All well and good, but after a while, when I’ve opened and closed some other documents in the alternate editor, the title of the PDF disappears and I can’t figure out how to get it back. Clicking on the header doesn’t do anything. Is there a way to get the title to display again?
Thanks for any insights!
MM