Disabling display of PDF documents?

[mythSSK]

On of my major projects I’m using Scrivener for including a lot of reference material, including some quite large PDF documents. Scrivener itself can struggle to display the contents of the PDFs (the program often hangs for up to 20 seconds when I click on some of the larger PDF files), and navigating the PDFs while in Scrivener is less ideal than Acrobat Reader, so I am typically only clicking on it to go to ‘Open in External Editor’ anyway.

I notice that for documents Scrivener doesn’t have the capability to display (such as Excel spreadsheets), when I click on them it just shows a link which I can then click on to open the document in Excel. Is there a way to disable Scrivener displaying the contents of PDF documents in my binder, so that they default to a display like this, instead? It would save me a lot of time.

[anon56864026]

Check out Section 18.5 of the manual; References.

[mythSSK]

Section 18.5 doesn’t cover this at all.

What I’d like is for Scrivener to default to opening the external PDF reader rather than opening PDFs inside Scrivener.

[anon56864026]

Within that section there’s this:

Create External Reference: creates a new row in which you can manually copy and paste or type in the internal title and valid URL or file path of the resource you wish to link to. This is most useful for creating links to the Internet, as you can just paste in the URL you have available, but local file URIs are also valid.

I think that will accomplish what you want. The link can be document or project-wide in scope. Perhaps I misunderstand your intention, the manual or both. Good luck.
literatureandlatte.com/docum … letter.pdf

[JJSlote]

You can achieve this effect by first creating a Windows Shortcut to the desired PDF via a right click in Explorer, then dragging the shortcut into Scrivener’s binder. You’ll be able to click a link in the pane to open the destination PDF in your viewer of choice.

The tradeoff, which may be an advantage or a disadvantage, is that the PDF stays right where it is; it won’t be backed up or moved with the project.

(Of course you can also Alt-drag the PDF into a Scriv document to create a Scrivener Link, with a different look but more flexibility than a dragged-in Windows Shortcut provides.)

Rgds – Jerome

[mythSSK]

@scshrugged: I’d still like to store PDF documents in the Binder itself, so the external reference doesn’t quite work.

@JJSlote: Thanks, this is a workaround that pretty much accomplishes exactly what I want! I’ll place the original PDFs in a separate folder within my project structure, and instead of dragging them in directly I’ll create shortcuts and drag those in instead Hadn’t even occurred to me that something like this would work.