Inspector comments are almost perfect for my needs, but there have been number of times where they fell short for me. What I want out of comments is what they already provide (notes that link back to some specific text in a document), plus the ability to separate them out by some attribute (via some kind of search) or arbitrarily, much the way that saved searches and collections work for documents in the binder.
Alternately, if that’s not feasible, I’d love to be able to click on a reference link to a specific passage in the text of a document. That way, I could create scrivener links to new ‘notes’ documents, and the reference back-link would take me directly to the linking text instead of just to the document the link is contained in.
One thing I have on my list of possibilities is somehow adding the ability to create a link to a comment, that would open the document (as with normal Scrivener links) and then jump to that comment.
In my ideal world, there would be a new kind of Scrivener Link, one that can not only link to another document, but could be linked to from another document, much like HTML anchors work.
I imagine that the infrastructure that allows one to click on a comment in the inspector and have the editor scroll to a particular part of a document would be a good start to this feature. But it could just as ‘easily’ be implemented by creating some invisible, unique code embedded in something like a scrivener link (let’s call it A-link, so that a link to A-link could load the target document to the editor (if not there already), and the perform a kind of find-by-formatting search specific to where A-link is in the document.
Either way, I’m sure it would be a bit of a challenge, but hopefully it would provide a useful way to let one search for, collect, and categorize notes to specific passages without having to break documents down into individual paragraphs. That’s the current strategy I’m using now; which works okay, but makes the maintenance of useful metadata a rather bigger headache than I’d like.
…I wonder if you could somehow leverage the upcoming styles code to provide some kind of target for these kinds of links to specific text within a document? An ‘anchor’ pseudo-style if you catch my drift.
Wouldn’t this do the same thing Robert was asking for anyway, making the comment the anchor point in the text? Thus you’d link to that comment from somewhere else, and clicking the link would open the document and then scroll to the commented text. I’m not seeing the difference between this and the “ideal world” of linking to specific text other than the anchor being visible (which seems more beneficial than otherwise). Perhaps my wits are sleepy?
Yes, exactly - I thought this would do exactly what he was asking for, too. You can collapse comments, too, so you don’t have to have them taking up too much space in the comments area, and you can use the comments area to look for anchors as well.
You can collapse comments, but it’s an all or nothing deal; you can’t, for instance, collapse all but the red comments, or all but the comments containing a particular string of text like “{plot}”, for instance.
But yes, being able to link to a comment will allow me to link from the reference pane (presumably) to a passage of text, albeit through an intermediary (the comment itself).
be implemented by creating some invisible, unique code embedded in something like a scrivener link (let’s call it A-link, so that a link 
You can collapse comments, too, so you don’t have to have them taking up too much space in the comments area, and you can use the comments area to look for anchors as well.