Is there anyway to assign a keyword to a word, sentence, or paragraph? Or, does it have to be assigned to the whole project/document?
Here’s why I’m asking. If I’m writing a long document and I have a paragraph I want to remember say, on the philosophy of history (or whatever), I want to be able to go directly to that paragraph. When I go back and do a keyword search later, I don’t want to have to read the whole document to see where I got the idea for a keyword. This is important to me because I’m writing 30 page documents.
However, remember that you can make a document arbitrarily short. Many people set things up so that documents correspond to major sections, but there’s no requirement that you do so. Scrivener doesn’t care whether a document contains 30 pages, or three lines.
Also take a look at the Comments feature, you can mark a paragraph with a comment, and then use that sidebar as a way to jump to that spot in the text, by clicking on the comment.
Thanks to you both. Now I know I will either have to break the documents up or just use comments. The only bummer is that you can’t search by comments.
Hmm…I suppose I could put a keyword for the document and then attach a comment that points me to the applicable sentence/paragraph. That might just work.
That could work nicely, that is similar to what I do if I want to link to a specific place in the text from another document. Of course Scrivener Links and References just point to the document, so the comment is just a second stage in the link to get where I need to go. Using a keyword search to get you to the document instead of a link is just a different way.
As for searching for comments, that’s actually one of the nice things about this technique. If you use text codes that are easy to search for you can use comments more dynamically. For example typing in “BOOKMARK//” into the comment field for places you wish to jump to, but the word used can be more meaningful as well. For example I build to-do lists into my project by adding comments with “TODO//” and maybe a little explanation as to what needs to be done or checked. That technique may provide enough specificity to do away with the keyword, if all it is otherwise used for is getting you to this document and others similarly marked.
Remember also that in Scrivenings mode, you can view multiple documents together.
NB: I am someone who breaks text up into very small sections, often as brief as one paragraph per document. I find this helps with searches and also helps keep paragraphs on topic – if I get beyond a couple of paragraphs, I need to check if I’m discussing additional points. At this point I either break up the text into smaller documents, or edit out extraneous detail.