Bidirectional linking of passages within a text

[Lambekin]

I am afraid that using Scrivenings mode whenever you need to compare two or more passages doesn’t entirely solve the problem.

Using links like the one I describe allows you to write a single, internally coherent text, such as a summary of a book, and add an extra layer which facilitates the process of seeing all of the internal connections when you revisit your notes later.

An internally coherent text can, indeed, be generated by using Scrivenings mode, as long as one carefully prepares all of the constituent chunks of text in such a way that they will reassemble in the way one envisioned beforehand (i.e., one should be careful not to change the order of those texts in the binder). Yet as soon as that text is generated the connections that were previously created will be ‘gone’, in the sense that they are not immediately apparent from the text.

Some of the texts I work with are 500+ pages in length. My notes for a single work of literature can run into 20+ pages; if I am comparing two works those notes could go up to 40 pages or more. Even if one disregards the problem that I describe above, having to divide those notes into 80-120 ‘texts’ would not be a very workable solution: reading the notes would then come down to clicking one’s way through a maze of individual paragraphs.

A similar request to mine was made in this thread:

literatureandlatte.com/forum … 30&t=38461

There, the user was hoping to create links of the type I describe across texts (i.e., you could link sentence A from text 1 to sentence B from text 2). The same arguments against implementing such a feature as those made in the post above were made in that thread, but one user explained the benefits of being able to create ‘granular’ links quite well:

I think the kind of thing that the users on this thread are referring to would be a situation such as where Document A has some narrative that includes something Bob said, and then in Document B there is another narrative where someone else says “To address what Bob said…,” and the writer would like to have a link on “Bob said” to exactly what it was that Bob said in Document A, in the context of Document A. It makes no sense whatsoever to split Document A near Bob’s quote if it’s a tiny part of some larger coherent narrative.

A workaround for this might be to copy Bob’s quote to a comment in Document B linked to “Bob said” and put a Scrivener link back to Document A in that comment, but then if you want the context you still need to scroll through Document A and find it. So this would in fact be new functionality that, at least as far as I can see, is not currently implemented in any convenient way.

Finally, generating a Scrivenings mode document takes time: for texts with a lot of content it is far from an instantaneous process. Thus having to do it repeatedly will hold up the user.