First, fantastic software. Thank you. I’m running Scrivener and Scapple on Mac OS 10.9.5. I’m planning on using these great tools to write my dissertation.
I’m trying to figure out how to use Scapple to have depth to organize all my ideas; just yesterday I realized that in a Scapple board, I can embed links to other boards. (I was planning on submitting a feature request about this, but it’s already there!) When I realized that drag & drop from the finder works simply and effectively, I felt so gratified.
Here’s the question: When I am working within Scrivener’s binder, I can open a Scapple board and edit it, it stays in the project and things are easy. But from that Scapple board, how can I easily link to other boards in the Scrivener project? I tried dragging a board from the Scrivener binder into the open board in Scapple, but it just copied the title (as text); same behavior when I option-drag. If there’s a way to drag & drop (and especially with a relative URL, so that if I move the project, links don’t break), that would be amazing.
The best and easiest way to do this would be to open both boards and then drag the title bar icon (up by the name of the board) into the target board. This will create a clickable link to that file wherever it may be (in this case, buried in a project package).
This is in fact just a general feature, not specific to Scapple files. Unless the thing you are dragging into the board is supported by Scapple as an embedded object (picture files) or capable of being imported (text files), then you’ll get a hyperlink as a result of the drop. You can in fact link to whole projects this way.
You won’t get relative links though. That isn’t something that is natively supported by the file protocol for hyperlinks. In general, if you plan on using a network of links between projects, or between other programs and projects, you want to keep things as static as possible on your disk.
One other side note: you can link to items in your project by right-clicking on them in the Binder and selecting Copy Document Link, to generate a URL to that specific item. I wouldn’t recommend it for this particular usage because that won’t open the .scap file, rather it would just open the project and open the editor to that resource, and I imagine you want the click to just directly open the board. But you might find that handy if you continue down this route of using Scapple to think about the stuff in your projects.