I’m using Scrivener to collect research for a script I’m writing and I’m finding that I’d like to be able to tag individual lines within files.
For example - I have a file that includes some relevant data on my topic going back to 1994. I’m really curious to see what data exists prior to 1994 - but I don’t want to take time out of what I’m currently doing to go research it. I’d love to be able to tag this line as “requires additional research” and then, put aside a chunk of time when I can go through all the “research required” items and tackle them at once.
Similarly - it would be awesome to have other line-level tags like “question” or “idea” or “needs rewording” or whatever.
Obviously, I can make an external list of these items. Or even add all files with that type of item to a collection. But I was just wondering if there’s a better convention for doing this?
I’m thinking something like how, in programming, there’s a convention to use a comment
// TODO: thing that needs to be done
inside your code wherever there’s still work to be done in that area (like “Add error handling” or whatever). Some editors even support this and will automatically pull up a list of all of your outstanding tasks with links to the appropriate part of each file where the TO DO is.
Is there anything similar with Scrivener? Or any ways people have found to handle it that work for them?
Since you’re using the Beta, I feel confident passing on some possibilities I’ve seen mentioned:
Use inline annotations. Go ahead and use a text tag like “%%ToDo” inside the annotation so you can search for it easily. You can make up your own tagging convention.
You can also use Inspector comments for this. The same comment applies re: making up your own convention. The advantage of Inspector Comments is that they’re all automatically listed in the Inspector sidebar for the files you have in a Scrivenings session. You can scroll down the list and click on one to bring up its document.
Note that (at least in the Mac version) these aren’t mutually exclusive; you can convert inline annotations to Inspector comments and vice-versa. Sorry I don’t know where to find the command on Windows
Another possibility: since this is research, it’s possible you’re never going to compile these files. In that case, go ahead and use whatever tagging convention you like. I’d steer clear of // just because Scriv might accidentally think it’s a link, or I might get false positives in my searches, but that’s me.
Oh, perfect! Thank you so much Silverdragon. I hadn’t used either of these features before - which now I’m realizing I’ve had silly workarounds for. So thank you! I love the %%TAG in the annotation idea - exactly what I was looking for.
