Is there any way to hide or filter certain types of formatting? I am writing songs with Scrivener and using revisions for a couple different of functions, ie one revision is for the chords only and another is just for ideas that i might want to include/build upon but i am not yet sure. I want a way to quickly toggle b/w seeing all of the different types of revisions visible on the screen, and be able to choose to then make some of the revisions not be visible so I just see the core text. Is it possible to do this by filtering /hiding revisions or certain formats? How would it work? This would be so good.
If not, is this possible in any other way? I’ve imagined something similar might be possible in scrivenings mode, but i dont think it would be as convenient as filtering/hiding by formatting, but i’m not sure either way.
Do you intend to Compile your songs eventually, or just write / keep them in Scrivener? If the latter, you could use different types of Scrivener annotation for your different kinds of revision. For example:
Great. I’m not sure, I think I could just do the latter. I will put them in evernote too because where I keep my setlists, but I could just copy and paste it there instead of compiling I think. Is it not possible to use filters if I plan on compiling the document?
More importantly- How can I filter between those kinds of revisions? And also, the way that I am currently doing it is using :
a) different colors of revisions (ie revisions 1-5)
b) different color highlighted texts
So could I filter the actual colors within those revisions/ways of formatting? Or is it only possible to filter by way of formatting (ie filter all revisions, but not one color at a time)?
I’m the wrong person to ask about compiling - I remember it gave me the most headaches when doing the tutorial!
As for filtering, if you decide what to filter on, you can do a Search in that specific type of thing and then save your search as a collection which is the equivalent of a Smart folder/playlist/album.
It is not technically possible for the type of text editor Scrivener uses to reliably hide and show text like you are describing, at least within the editor. It was something we looked into with Apple’s engineers years ago, when looking for a way to hide and show inline annotations, and it’s not possible to do safely.
Beyond the text editor though, as something Scrivener can do? Absolutely, but at the outline level, not text. You would break your text down into smaller chunks of text and use its meta-data features (labels, keywords, custom meta-data… whatever works best) to tag those chunks. From there you can search within the project interface by type, use Scrivenings to view and edit only by those types, and ultimately compile with the Filter feature at the bottom of the Contents pane to strip out one type, only include one type, or if you need compound types, use collections as filters.
Thanks ScriverTid! What do you mean by do a search in that specific type of thing? I tried using the search bar and clicking the little arrow next to the magnifying glass icon to see other ways of searching and also the search by formatting in the menu bar… do you mean one of these? if so, how would i use these for revisions/highlighted parts?
Thanks AmberV! Could you please explain what you mean by the outline level? Do you mean by showing only certain documents to show in the scrivenings mode, or something else?
And what do you mean by " break your text down into smaller chunks of text"? So i would have to manually add a label or some sort of meta data to each chunk that has a revision made to it to filter it? The revision doesn’t itself come with meta data saying what color it is? I’m sorry if I’m not understanding basic ideas about Scrivener, am just a bit confused about how I would integrate this into my workflow.
I’ve attached a screenshot of a page that i’m working with. I want to make it so that i can just see the blue text, for example. Or just see the black and green text, for example. How would i use your method in this situation?
You may be mixing up different things here? In the Search (and thereby saving as Collections) you can select All, or a specific like text or metadata such as label, status, keywords, date, etc, using the little arrow drop down menu.
However, for revisions, you use the snapshot function: i.e. you snapshot your work at regular intervals, e.g. when you’re provisionally content but think you may wish to edit further sometime, or perhaps immediately after making a major change. Then you can use the Compare function to pick up changes made since the Snapshot you’re using.
As far I know, you can’t Search for highlighted text? But someone else may know better and wish to correct me…
The Edit/Find/Find by Formatting… tool can search for both highlighted text, text that has had a colour applied to it in general, and as well you can search by Revision level. There are a lot of functions that tool can do—but it’s not a filtering tool like Project Search, it’s more like Cmd-F style find where you walk through hits. The main difference between regular document find and formatting find is that it will jump from one document to the next in the binder.
As for my earlier suggestion—by the outline I mean the binder itself. There is no limit to how small a piece of text you can put into each “file”. If you’ve ever used a program like OmniOutliner the idea might be more familiar. Given your screenshot however, I don’t know if you’d want to put a single line into its own section or not. It certainly would not be impossible with Scrivenings mode (in the View menu), and in particular the option in the Formatting preference pane at the very bottom to use single line breaks for Scrivenings.
But what that approach gives you ties back into how you can filter by searching for outline items. You could tag all of the blue text outline items with a certain label, then search for that label and read only those notes in Scrivenings mode. It’s the only way to filter the editor.
Wow. I just used that Find by formatting - that’s got some power! What a shame you can’t globally change one colour of text to another - you have to do it ‘find’ by ‘find’ … but at least it selects contiguous blocks of colour so you just need your colour palette right by the dialogue ready to click, then Next.
