Challenges with revisions

Scrivener
,
1

Revisions had been working fine. But now I’m having a couple issues:

  1. When I select text I want to revise and choose Mark Revised from the Revision Mode drop-down menu, it doesn’t do anything (forcing me to cut and then paste it back unformatted as a work around in order to “process” revisions – and even that sometimes pastes it back in colored revision mode text).

  2. When I go to the instruction manual, it doesn’t even note the “Mark Revised” command that I use. Instead, 18.6.3 refers to a “Remove Current Revision Color” command that doesn’t appear on my drop-down menus.

Scrivener Version: 3.1.4.0 (1905013) 64-bit - 19 Jan 2023.
Windows 11 Home, Version 10.0.22621 Build 22621.

2

Revisions will color text ADDED to the project until you select Format>Revision Mode>None to stop. For what you are talking about, you may be better off with snapshots as can compare changes between two files side by side if you wish.

1 Like
3

image

Mark revised will indeed apply the current revision color to a selection. (That’s actually what the function’s name says it’ll do.)

Looks like you are applying the revision color, then try to have passages revert to black font (or default color font) as you revise.
If that is the case, you are using the feature the wrong way around.

Mark Revised and Remove Current Revision Color are the same menu item, switching to one or the other, depending on the cursor/selection being on text of a revision color or not.
. . . . . . .

The feature is not intended to mark “revised passages” (as in : “This part I’ve read already.”), it is rather intended to mark where edits were made.
If you want to mark the text as revised as you go (“This part I’ve revised already”), simply change the font color of the chunk/paragraph to tin/gray as you work your way down through your text.
image

This way you’ll know where you are at in your revision of a document, and the edits will stand out by their specific revision color (blue, red, green). → Revision colors supersede font color.
Once you are through with your revision of a document, revert its text back to the default (or black) color. (Select all, color picker.) The revisions (edits) will remain of the revision color, giving you a clear picture of where (exactly, precisely) you made changes.

You can keep track of the revision process on a project scale by updating your documents’ status accordingly, at the bottom of the inspector. (That’s the selector right next to the labels’.)
image

So say you mark revised passages (not edits ; passages you’ve read through) of a document with the tin font color, you can set the font color back to normal without a problem once you are done with that document, without loosing track of your overall progress, if you mark the document as “revised” in its status. (You can create as many custom status tags as you want.)

“Revision 1”
“Revision 2”
Or even “Third draft - Revision 1”.
→ “Last Final draft - revision 3697” :wink:
Anything that accommodates your own personal approach/method.
. . . . . . . . . .

In short : When used properly, you basically only have to turn the revision mode on, and edit away.

1 Like
4

Do you perhaps have an old copy of the manual downloaded, that you are using instead of the one in the Help menu? You should be seeing full documentation for all of the available commands here (you will not see them all at once, as described in the manual), Appendix A.9, Format Menu, around pg. 649.

The “Mark Revised” command itself is more fully described in §18.6.2, Marking Existing Text, directly prior the section you refer to.

1 Like
5

I can’t replicate the problem. (MacOS Ventura. Latest Scriv.)

-gr

Of course, as others have indicated it sounds like you are using the Mark Revised function in a way not intended – using it to mark text you merely intend to revise. The Mark Revised function is, presumably, just there for occasional fix-up scenarios. Revision marking should generally take care of itself – that is why it is a mode.

For text I just want to flag to come back to and revise, I select and turn it into an inline annotation. Nice and easy to see.

1 Like
6

Okay, apologies – because of an editing glitch I misdescribed what I was doing. "I should have said something like “When I select text I want to unrevise…” Mea culpa. (And I had in my head that Mark Revised was a reference to Mark As Revised, as if returning it to normal.)

With that said, the fact that the “Remove Current Revision Color” listing only appears when NO color has been selected seems odd to me. But no matter: I do seem to be back to getting what I wanted when I select “Remove Revisions” after highlighting revised text (I had stopped using it after I once inadvertently removed all revisions in the file, but now I see that only happens when I use it without blocking any text. )

Amber, Adobe’s search tool didn’t flag the Mark Revised reference in 18.6.2, so I I had missed it when I went to 18.6.5 . I’ve fixed the Adobe search issue, so I can quickly spot both references now. (And since I incorrectly described the problem the first time out, feel free to delete this thread so it’s not a false flag for others.)