File lock, e-mail, export links

Scrivener Wish List
1

Hi all,

I personally would like to see these features in scrivener (not sure if a few of them already work on Mac OS X, but need it for windows first :slight_smile: )

1. Editor Lock

Please provide a quick mechanism like you can find it e.g. on emacs to prevent you from typing in stuff for a moment, it happens to me so often, that I start typing into my edit window when I think I am in another window.

2. Search/Index eMails I pull in

I use scrivener for a lot of documentation work inside the company and a lot of information is captured inside eMails. It would be really great if this feature could be implemented, to at least index the text part only from eMail. That would help so much in consolidating information.

Btw. when you do this, direct drag and drop from Outlook would be awesome, currently I have o work around this by dragging the mails onto a temporary location on the desktop and then drag it into scrivener.

3. Export from the research folder

Whenever I have some research on a topic I throw that into the research folder (which is a great place/mechanism to do, kudos for that), but the trouble I have is that I need to submit the information to some other guy not running scrivener and I want to export the information from the research folder into a new one, let’s say I am preparing a folder with a document export from scrivener AND have all file attachments exported to that folder too. It’d be nice if the export would take the filename from the label I gave it in the view (so not exporting 123.txt and such).

4. Export with correct links

Whenever I export a document from scrivener that contains scrivener links to research data, this data is no longer preserved when the document is exported. This is kind of an expansion to 3. So while I get this might be harder to implement, I think the idea behind 3 should be relatively easy to do and it would be a really great added value to the order from chaos idea (which I actually like a lot). So when you for example export HTML, this could be linked relative to the exported documents location.

I hope these features can be implemented with the next release. Also I really think this will benefit a lot of people using scrivener, not just me.

What do you think?

2

Somewhat flippant retort here, but can’t you just undo? I accidentally type in windows all of the time as well—I did in this one while writing the response—but Ctrl-Z does just fine for me when that happens. I’d rather have a reactive tool that I only need to use when I mess up, than a pre-emptive tool that I have to remember to trigger and trigger more often because I’m also covering for times when I wouldn’t have made a mistake. :slight_smile:

As for file locking, if you’ve reached a point where you no longer want edits made to a file, snapshot it. Best of both worlds.

Not a bad idea, but I can say quite often a lot of that comes down to what the program serves when you drag out of it. If it isn’t providing anything useful to a third-party application then it mightn’t be possible to get stuff in. For instance, is there a public and open specification for reading the .msg format? I don’t really know a whole lot about it, but it’s not text based whatever it is. Pity outlook’s [b]File/Save As...[/b] feature lumps all selected e-mails into a single text file with no good break between e-mails. There’s probably a macro for that; that’s what I’d be looking for. I’ve always preferred to archive my e-mail messages in text documents anyway. It means that stuff I saved from 1993 can still be easily opened, even though the programs and services I used to write and receive them are now long gone.

According to FileFormat:

I keep thinking monosodium-glutamate.

From what I see, it can be reasonably well decoded, but only so long as Microsoft doesn’t change it (and they never do that, right?). So I don’t know, an add-on that lets you archive messages in normal file formats might be better.

This is already possible. Are you making sure to select the items you wish to export, before you export? Or maybe you’re using the word export but meaning compile? You can’t compile out of just anywhere—but you can certainly export with [b]File/Export/Files...[/b]. That will do text conversions as requested, and export native file formats, all with binder naming instead of numbers.

That would be tougher to implement, and plus not every format would even support it. HTML wouldn’t be a problem. But it is something we have on the list to think about; either Export or Compile—whichever it would have to optional.

Well! I wouldn’t expect that to be frank. There are still a lot of things in the backlog that need to be done first.