I am wanting to use Scrivener for creating my Bible Class books so to create eBooks. You can see some of my current ones at mikealrhughes.com. I have done the previous ones in Pages. I want to some how link verses in when some hovers over a reference as well. Any help ideas appreciated. If any one uses Scrivener this way would love to collaborate.
Dr. Mike Hughes, Minister
Manteno church of Christ
Manteno, il
Mail@mikealrhughes.com
When you say “eBooks”, what format are you referring to for these? I’m assuming you don’t mean a format that might be read on an iPhone, or a Kindle where the concept of hovering over something is somewhat impossible. There are some analogues, such as tap-and-hold and cursor movement with a joystick apparatus, but these are all “hardware” tools that the book author has no control over. Likewise PDF, though more commonly viewed on a computer where there are mice pointers to hover with, doesn’t have a universal info box type feature that pops up when you hover over a bit of text. Pretty much the only thing I can think of that provides this form of function in a fairly reliable fashion (it doesn’t always work in all browsers, especially those rigged up for reading aloud, Braille conversion and such) are web pages and some sort of CSS voodoo (or formerly more common, JavaScript) that reveals elements when the mouse is hovering over them.
What usually works better, and in a more compatible and flexible fashion are footnotes or endnotes. These can be easily administered in Scrivener, either as inline designations of text, or in the sidebar. When compiling to ePub or Mobi, they can be featured as endnotes with cross-links so you can select a link using the reading devices mechanism for doing so, jump to the reference, and then when you are done enact a second link to jump back to where you were (or as is often the case, using the Back button on the device, which works like a web browser). The nice thing about using Scrivener’s footnote features for this is that you can then go and do different things with it in other formats. If you do wish to print it out or make a PDF, you could so using standard and familiar ways of doing it. If you already use the footnote feature for other things, you could try splitting it up. This won’t help you out for any formats that don’t use footnotes, like eBooks, but if you put the footnotes in the sidebar and the references inline, you can treat them differently when you compile so that one becomes endnotes and the other footnotes.