Hello,
While I work on my texts, I would like to be able to lock (make a text read-only). Of course, I would like to be able to revert this from time to time.
I am wondering about the best way of tackling this in Scrivener. Is there anything like this already built in and I just don’t know where it is?
Thanks.
As far as text that you enter into scrivener, I don’t think there is a way to make it read-only. There are tricks to make sure you don’t lose anything while editing adjacent text.
For instance, you can take a snapshot of each document that has sections you are done with.
Better yet, split the document so that the finished portion is on it’s own and the part left to edit is also isolated. Take snapshots of those and work from there.
Use the status marker (see the inspector drop-down), and enable stamps in cork board mode to remind yourself that those documents are not to be edited.
Use revision colors so that any new text you add is in a different color (which gets changed to the default color when you compile).
Simply highlight blocks of text that you don’t want to edit, so that you have a visual reminder not to edit that portion of a document.
There are lots of ways to remind yourself not to change some part of your project, so pick what should work best for you. But do use the snapshots feature. …And the backup feature too (not related to this discussion).
Hi,
I would definitely recommend using snapshots for this. For a section of text you want to make read-only, just hit cmd-5 to take a snapshot. A read-only version of that text will then be stored in the “snapshots” area of the Inspector. You can carry on editing the text in the main editor, but you have a frozen, uneditable version of the text over in the inspector. You can click “Compare” to compare the older version to any edits you have made, and you can roll back to the frozen version any time you want if you made edits you didn’t like. This is better than a simple read-only function, too, in that you can take as many snapshots as you want for any document, so you if you take a snapshot and make some edits and aren’t sure which version is best, you can take snapshots of both and decide later.
Hope that helps.
All the best,
Keith