The current version (2.x) doesn’t support collaborating with a writing partner. It would be good if there was a collaboration mode that allowed two people to work on the same Scrivener file at the same time. Perhaps a “check out” feature for the section(s) that a person is working. As long as that folder is checked out, the other cannot edit it; only view it.
Welcome to the forum, Xelmyrion.
Somewhere on this Board there’s a thread where someone has made a useful distinction between “parallel collaboration” (i.e. two or more people working on the same project at the same time) and “serial collaboration” (i.e. two or more people working on the same project at different times). Scrivener currently supports serial collaboration (except that there are some “gotchas” to be aware of - see this thread, especially the early part).
From your email, you’d like to collaborate in a parallel fashion, or at least a mode close to that. I don’t see that happening any time soon (I believe that Google has employed a large development team and resources way beyond the means of Literature and Latte to enable parallel collaboration to work on its software), but I could be wrong, I’ve no special insights and Keith and his team could always surprise us.
Hi,
There are no plans to add live collaboration in the mid-term future, sorry. This isn’t because I don’t think it would be a great feature that would be useful to some writers, but more a matter of resources. We’re a small team (I’m the sole Mac developer and designer of the software), and real-time collaboration is a huge, huge feature, requiring a whole cloud backend and server operations. Done badly, it could completely corrupt projects. This is the reason that there aren’t many pieces of software that allow this - is there much other than Google Docs? And Google Docs has the biggest company in the world behind it, and it doesn’t deal with projects of the complexity of Scrivener files.
That said, there is something coming in the future that may be helpful: the Import Scrivener Project feature will be able to detect whether the project you are importing is a copy of the current project, and if so it will offer to merge the projects, taking snapshots of changed documents and replacing the text with the latest version, importing files that have been added in the most appropriate position, and so on. You would need to co-ordinate with your partner on this. You’d need to let each other know when you’re ready to do a merge and agree which copy should be the master project, and then delete the copied project after it was imported into the master and make a fresh copy for the other collaborator and so on. But with proper communication between partners and an understanding of how it works, it could be used much as you want, I think, similar to a check out/check in system.
I’ll provide more details later in the year when the version containing this feature is closer to release.
All the best,
Keith
Hi Keith,
Wondering how this feature is/is not coming along?
About to start working with an editor and absolutely do not want to jump ship to Word
Thanks,
Matthew
Hi Matthew,
The version with the “import and merge” feature isn’t going to be ready until next year some time, I’m afraid. I was hoping I’d be able to announce it this year, but issues with iOS have pushed everything back, as have certain under-the-hood changes in El Capitan.
All the best,
Keith
Hi Keith,
Understood… (and anxiously awaiting that iOS version!!!)
In the meantime, I’m happy to live with some kind of workaround, but not sure of the best way.
I need to feed text files (or folders of text files) from Scrivener to my editor, have him use Word to edit, and then bring them back in to Scrivener.
Someone here suggested importing the Word document back into Scrivener and the Tracked Changes would show up as comments. That would work fine for me, but I tried this and nothing shows up in comments. What do I need to do to enable this?
Another suggestion was to save the Word file as a PDF and import into the research folder, and bring it up side-by-side. One advantage of this is that I have to manually re-write, which introduces an extra layer of thought into the process.
Finally, what would you suggest as a way to automate the exporting (and, if possible, the importing) individual text files that are ready for editing to my editor?
Much appreciated. I completely respect your focus on keeping Scrivener the BEST at what it does and not try to bring on features that are too complicated, etc. That said, from reading these forums I know there are many of us who have the exact same need.
Matthew
Hi Matthew,
If files are going out separately, one way of doing this would be to use the external folder sync feature, but I’m not sure that is what you are doing, especially if you are working with an editor.
Comments should be imported from Word or RTF files, though, so it might be worth sending a problematic file to us at mac.support AT literatureandlatte.com if they aren’t showing up. On the other hand, I’m not sure if there are differences between track changes comments and regular comments - I thought they were pretty much the same as far as RTR is concerned.
Another option is indeed bringing the imported Word (or PDF) file up alongside your text. Another thing added to the next version that will help here (which I know doesn’t help you right now) is the ability to add “Open in Scrivener” links at the start of each section in an exported file, which get converted back to Scrivener links when you re-import. This means that you can Compile a Word document, have someone edit it (telling them to leave the links at the top of each section intact), and then import it and click on the link at the start of each section to open that document alongside in Scrivener.
Another option might be using a macro to convert the Track Changes in a Word document to strike-throughs and coloured text. It’s a shame Word doesn’t do this automatically, but a quick search revealed some macros online to do this (unfortunately they were all in Windows Visual Basic, though…).
All the best,
Keith
Word macros run on the Mac version (except 2008). I imagine too you could do the same thing using Nisus and its Perl macro features (I recall Keith saying once he wished everyone used Nisus) but I don’t have a copy to try it.
For collaboration, I really like CriticMarkup, which is baked into MultiMarkdown 4 and later. I’m not sure how Scrivener would handle MMD docs though with CM syntax - I’ve been meaning to give it a try - and much as I personally love Markdown, most of the world does not agree so your best bet, to paraphrase Keith, is to work with Word and kick it in nuts until it does what you and your workflow demands.
Yes, I’ve been trying to work with Word and kicking it in the nuts for years !!!
There is zero chance of weaning my editor away from Word, so will start kicking again and see what happens.