Hello!
I am writing a textbook, based on half a dozen different but overlapping reviews I wrote previously.
I would like to highlight each topic in each review and then bring them together: I would then select the best fragment for each topic and use the merged topics as the basis for the text. (Many fragments are text only, but quite a few are just a key diagram.)
Any suggestions for the best Scrivener procedure would be welcome - I am sure it has been done before, but I can’t find the right article.
Many thanks for Scrivener - an awesome way to unmuddle a brain’s thoughts,
Chris Gold
I think appending selections to a gathering area would be your best tactic here. This way of collecting passages is quite flexible. It allows you to decide where things should go as you make them, and later on you can use the split and merge tools to clean that up further. By brief example, say you are going through one review and you find a couple of paragraphs you want to slice over to the work in progress. You select them in the text editor, right-click on the selection, and choose the “Append Selection to Document” sub-menu. In there you have two choices:
- Create a brand new document for this passage,
- Append the text to an existing document.
With option #1, you’ll be asked to title the new document, and given a choice where it should be placed. With the second choice you would merely select the existing document to tack on the text to the end of. In this way you can fairly swiftly pull out all of the things you wish to preserve, and then move over to the preliminary structure of documents you’ve created, using Documents/Split/ and Documents/Merge menu commands to second-guess your original placement choices and so forth. For maximum flexibility, you could cut each passage into its own document. I’d use the Draft as your collection point since the new document selection box selects that by default. You can then just click and drag to re-arrange the passages into the new order needed for the text book. At that point you could merge them all together, or merge them into groups depending upon how you feel they will be laid out into the chapter text that is built around them. Since merging can be done at any time (or even not at all!) this can be deferred for later. You can establish groups of things without merging them by selecting the related passages and using the Documents/Group menu command.