How can one add a bookmark / link to a piece of text (not to an item in the binder)?
At least as far as Scrivener links are concerned, this is not currently possible. It has often been requested. I’m not sure whether or not it will be present in the much-anticipated Scrivener for Windows version 3.
Thank you David,
Actually I would say there is no link in that title. Sometimes titles are underlined sometimes they are not, do not know why.
Hmmm, such a basic formatting not possible? Actually I would think…alright, so I will just leave it.
Many thanks again
Remember that an item in the Binder can be as granular as you like, down to a single sentence or paragraph. So linking to individual paragraphs within a document adds significant complexity without really introducing new functionality.
To link to a paragraph, you have to give it an identifier of some kind. Otherwise Scrivener has no way to find it. But once you give it an identifier, why not just make it a Binder item?
Katherine
Because you want to be able to easily find the specific reference within a document without splitting it into multiple documents. OneNote, to give just one example, does this.
But what’s wrong with splitting it up?
Scrivener is designed around the idea of assembling discrete chunks of writing into a complete and coherent whole.
OneNote is a different program, designed for a different purpose.
Katherine
Thank you Katherine.
I am not quite sure whether I understand it correctly. Do you mean to just (partially) change the structure of a story / screenplay the story / screenplay needs to get a link to a piece of text and get a structure the story / screenplay does not need / want?
Well, actually I didn’t want to have e.g. sentences (or paragraphs) / a piece of text being alone in a Binder item (to get that functionallity) with a different formatting / with spaces (where no space should be), paragraphs (when separating a sentence) I do not want, a dashed line, etc.
Or am I missing anything?
Thanks again
But those boundaries of those discrete chunks should make logical sense for the writer and not be dictated by the limitations of the software.
For example, I am using Scrivener for mathematics. I don’t want to split the proof of a theorem up into discrete chunks for the sole purpose of referencing some bit in the middle from some other document.
I have to say that I agree with liz on this one. Of course, it might involve more complexity in programming than the result would be worth; I don’t know. But it would be nice to be able to link to a specific sentence or paragraph within a document from another document. “What’s wrong with splitting it up” is that the document itself may already have coherence; and the linked material has context when it is part of an entire document, not an isolated bit in the binder.
Perhaps this just has to do with some people using Scrivener differently than others; or with creating nonfiction working differently than creating fiction. But there are good reasons for wanting to do this.
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This is what Scrivenings mode is for. You can create as many chunks at the same outline level as you like, view them as a coherent whole while writing, and decide later whether to show that structure to the reader in your output document.
I’m not saying you’re “wrong” to find intra-document linking useful. Just that there’s no easy way to implement it given the current structure of Scrivener projects, which assumes a different approach.
Katherine
A fair point, but how granular do you need for your links to be? If you have five links to different locations in a single paragraph, do you really need to link to each individual sentence, separately or can you link to the paragraph as a whole? How meaningful will the difference be to the reader?
Katherine
Basically the best would be to get a link to a sentence within a paragraph. So I could get the core information in a context immediately. And linking to a paragraph as a whole would be good also. So when there are 10 paragraphs (which shall be kept in a single item) in a Binder item and the second one or / and the fifth (etc.) could be linked to it would be good as well.
Actually it’s just for me, in a none Scrivenings mode.
Is it possible to do something like repurpose the comment link IDs so that you could link back from another document and have whatever segment of text you referenced be highlighted? It’s not necessary to have a unique identifier for each bit of text so that it pops up at the top. I would just like to be able to find something without having to reread the entire document and try to figure out what it was I had in mind with the link.
Thanks for this. I have to admit that I haven’t really explored Scrivenings. And overall I appreciate how Scrivener is structured, and how in general it allows a great deal of flexibility for users to create their own ways of using it. I do think the kind of linking we’re talking about would be a great addition; but if it would be too problematic to implement well, I’m living without it so far. 
Another question to consider: what problem are you ultimately trying to solve? Under what circumstances will the proposed link be clicked? When the link is clicked, what information do you want to present to the reader?
I don’t know what the answer is for your particular project. In my own work, though, internal links most often point to a definition, an image, or a reference, all of which seem to naturally have the kind of coherence that justifies creating a sub-document.
If, instead, you’re doing something like line-by-line commentary on a text, perhaps the solution is to rethink the layout so that the text and commentary are in such close proximity that links are not required?
Katherine
The information I want to access / see is information that is related / has a context to the source information (the link is contained). E.g. one has a subject 1 in an item / folder / doc A at the beginning (of a story, a proof of a theorem related to another proof of a theorem or what ever) and at the end of the story one has a subject 2 in an Binder item Z containg text relating to subject 1 you want to see / access in this context. May be the same (of countless) reasons why one uses bookmarks / links within a Word doc / in other writing programs.
May be a good alternative (partially at least) would be if one could build Scrivenings which included marked text / partial areas (of Binder items) only of special folders / docs. So you have 50 Binder items contained in a Scrivening, 10 of them contain / show only special areas / text / pieces (one has marked before for instance).
Yes, that is a proper way of using such links I would say. I do it the same way. By the way, creating links (or even Scrivenings) to other items / pieces of text to other projects would be very great as well.
Sorry, I do not understand, do you have an example? But to adapt the structure / layout to the need / position of links or so actually would not be a good idea for me, I suppose. And I would assume it is not possible (in a practical way). If one has e.g. 5 links in the same source information to different items / positions / pieces of text, etc. in the project, how could one do it?
I’m thinking of the kind of close analysis that you sometimes see with legal documents, scriptural documents, or sometimes literature, where even individual words might have paragraphs of supporting analysis. Those aren’t my fields, so I’m not sure exactly how they handle it, but one option would be to have the text in one column and the commentary in another, or a line of text followed by analysis.
Katherine
Very sorry, I do not understand at all, respectively I do not understand how to apply that to use it as a subsitute for the links / bookmarks.
I think the kind of thing that the users on this thread are referring to would be a situation such as where Document A has some narrative that includes something Bob said, and then in Document B there is another narrative where someone else says “To address what Bob said…,” and the writer would like to have a link on “Bob said” to exactly what it was that Bob said in Document A, in the context of Document A. It makes no sense whatsoever to split Document A near Bob’s quote if it’s a tiny part of some larger coherent narrative.
A workaround for this might be to copy Bob’s quote to a comment in Document B linked to “Bob said” and put a Scrivener link back to Document A in that comment, but then if you want the context you still need to scroll through Document A and find it. So this would in fact be new functionality that, at least as far as I can see, is not currently implemented in any convenient way.
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Hmmm, well, yes, thank you liz, it somehow sounds very…so it appears to be easier to just to add an “identifier” (chain of characters or so) at the text one wants have a link to and add the same chain of characters to the source information and use the search to show / find the destination text.