I have been trying to us the clipping function in the latest version of Scrivener on a Mac OS Sequoia v15.5 on Safari with little success. The manual and even chatGPT has sparse information on setting clipping up or even using it. This morning I was able to clip some web text and get it into a text Scrivener document. I tried clipping more a few minutes later to the same text document, however everything under the Scrivener Services menu item was gone. Same text document, same website, the Scrivener Services were there for the first clip, but completely gone for the second. I’m a long time Windows user who has recently moved to a Mac so my problem may be related to lack of understanding of Mac Services. Any help on getting this to work would be appreciated.
Safari has to be the active program—the name of the active program is right beside the apple in the menu bar—and then you should get the Services to add content to Scrivener.
If not, get to the Service settings/preferences (no English user interface here). At best through any app’s Service menubar menu (not content/right click menu), bottom entry, because its preferences are well hidden in the macOS settings. Check the Text section and tick all Scrivener services you’d like to use.
Thanks. Got it and working. Your were right. It was well hidden.
Just one caution. ChatGPT is no substitute for a normal search engine. It is wrong as often as right, and in a couple of recent tests I was able to confirm a post I saw suggesting that changing as little as a single word in the prompt can change the result from right to wrong.
There have also been numerous cases where ChatGPT confidently described Scrivener functionality that doesn’t exist.
The manual, this forum, and our support system are the three best sources of information about Scrivener.
To return to a comment made in your original note, you mentioned the user manual being a bit sparse on how to set this up and use it, did you happen across the subsection on it? It’s in §9.3, in case you didn’t, and would be happy to hear any feedback on how it could be improved. I feel like it covers all of the core questions you asked, namely:
- It’s a text selection-based tool which won’t appear until that criteria is met.
- Where to go in System Settings if you aren’t seeing anything (and how to set up keyboard shortcuts).
- The two places they will commonly appear (Application menu / contextual menu on a text selection).
If you want to use an AI-assisted search engine, I heartily recommend Perplexity.ai. It does not hallucinate or fib. It searches the web much faster than humans can, and then aggregates the results into a report with citations. If you ask it for technical support on an app, it will often read the online manual as well as the forums to figure out how to solve your problem. it’s one of the best AI products I’ve used.
Cheers.
I assume this in not native to windows. You can use the windows key + shift + S to get a snip of a screen shot and then past this into Scrivener.
Services, with a capital letter, is a macOS infrastructure that allows software to modify data in other programs, or extract data and do things with it. You can select a pitch you wrote in Scrivener, and tell your mail client to send it to your agent, use a text manipulation tool’s functions on your text directly, or have LaTeX render your equation syntax into a typeset image, replacing the syntax, or later on the reverse, deconstruct the image back to syntax to edit it.
Scrivener’s participation in that system is to extract selected text from any other native Mac program, into binder items or document notes.
Glad I could help.
You might take a look at PopClip, a very handy little app that pops up every time you highlight text (like on iOS, just good). Out of the box it only offers Copy & Paste and other basics, but there is a huge extension directory that is constantly being extended. The (free) extensions allow, amongst other things, to send the highlighted text to numerous apps, including Scrivener, of course.
I have not affiliation to the maker of PopClip, I’m just a happy user who recommends it to every new Mac user without being asked.
With the latest version (probably still in beta) you’re able to extract text and paste it as such. It’s actually known as Snipping Tool, and the keyboard shortcut was hived off OneNote and implemented Windows wide.
Cool . I use snagit which also has a text extractor.