Document References, relative links?

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I’m just starting to investigate using Document References, and I just wanted to make sure I’m not missing anything - are file links there only absolute? There’s no way to get a relative file link?

I thought it might be useful for me to use Document References to link to completed/compiled versions of the documents I work on in Scrivener, link to invoices, receipts, any other supporting documents. I envision a great system where my documents are all linked to everything they need to be linked to and quickly available and it’s wonderful. But I don’t necessarily want or need to actually import that stuff into the project itself - for instance I’m thinking that would just make it more difficult to find the files again from other programs, say if I need to email them to people, whereas if they’re linked by Document References it’s just a couple of clicks to email any file.

Why relative links are important: each year I start a new top level work folder, so I’m currently using 2013. At the end of the year that folder gets dropped into my Archive folder and I’ll start a 2014 folder. But if Document References are all absolute then all my links will break when I do that. :frowning: And I’d need them to work come, say, tax time, or whenever a client loses a file and needs me to resend it (happens frequently).

2

Relative paths are not possible in the references and such, no. Strictly speaking you might be able to get around the problem by editing the paths in the project.scrivx file for your project when you rearrange your documents, using a find/replace to quickly update a path of C:\Users\Username\2013\ to become C:\Users\Username\Archives\2013. The .scrivx file is just an XML, so you can open it in a plain text editor or XML editor to do the replacement if you’re comfortable with that. Create a backup of the project first, then do the replacement and open the project again to test it out.

3

Okay, thanks. Given that, it might just be easier to revise my folder structure so nothing needs to move at the end of the year - I guess that’s not really a hard requirement, that’s just how I’d been doing things.

Meanwhile I’ve been playing around more in Aeon Timeline, and since it does relative links it might make more sense to do the linking from there (especially once Scrivener 2.0 comes out and I can synchronize a timeline with multiple scriv projects - though we’ll have to see how that works in practice).

I have the feeling that between the two programs there’s a perfect workflow waiting for me, I just need to figure out what it is (and how to integrate Scapple as well). :mrgreen: