Hi,
I’m trying to import research from different pages in my OneNote notebooks as External Inspector Bookmarks to Scrivener files and folders. Below I describe the issue, ask for a solution, suggest some feature changes based on what I saw and suggest a work-around in lieu of a solutoon. I hope this post is not too garbled up to be useful and intelligible (but I was too lazy to write up several forum posts).
OneNote has a menu item to generate links to a page, which copies linked strings to the clipboard. If I paste that link into some rich text editor, such as TextEdit it has the general form Name of the OneNote page (Webview) with the Name of the OneNote page-part being linked to a onenote:https://…-style URL, which is a file-handler and opens directly in the OneNote application if installed, and the Webview-part being linked to a https://… -style url, which is the OneNote notebook stored in OneDrive, which opens in a web browser. If I paste the same string into any prompt which does not support rich text formatting such as theTerminal, the descriptive hyperlink labels disappear and only the URLs remain in reversed order, that is first the https://… -link followed by a line break and then the onenote:https://…-link.
If I paste the string into the dialog box in the Inspector as an External bookmark, the linebreak disappears for some reason so I have a sequence of two links. If I click that link or try to preview it in the web view, only the first link gets parsed, and Scrivener starts loading the OneNote page in OneDrive, which is however password-protected and needs a log-in for access. If I double-click the link in the Inspector, the URL gets opened in an external web browser and I’m able to log-in and view the content. However, if I want to preview the webpage in the Inspector by clicking on Load Web Page, I’m unable to log-in and everytime I enter my password and click Sign in the click gets redirected and opened again in an external web browser. I can return to the Scrivener window and click the button again, but the page never finishes loading.
So my question is if there is any way to store log-in credentials for the Load Web Page-function or if this is a specific bug in the handling of the OneDrive log-in routine?
Also I’m not sure if the removal of the line break is a bug - it certainly does not seem to be expected behavior on the part of the user.
I imagine I’m not the only one using note-taking or knowledge-base applications such as OneNote, Evernote, or DEVONthink to store research for writing, so I assume a better integration into Scrivener for the most popular ones would be a nice feature, and a better way to parse links generated by these applications - in this case by OneNote - could be an easy feature addition.
If there is no solution for the hyperlink issues, I’ll probably just end up pasting the links into the document notes page of the Inspector, which - as a rich text editor - preserves both hyperlinks and the link labels.
Unfortunately, it does not seem possible to open hyperlinks to websites from Inspector Notes (or any other rich text editor component of Scrivener) in an editor or copy-holder or any other in-application sub-pane, which I think should be possible - in comparison handling of PDFs and cross-links within seems more mature. But this kind of use case and restriction of the external bookmarks makes that particular feature redundant at least in my use case.
Also, since there is no Scrivener menu item to add bookmarks to individual files and folders (rather than project bookmarks) I don’t see a way of setting up a keyboard shortcut to add such external links, which would be essential if I bulk import hundreds of links into Scrivener, and I think exposing all application features to the system so that keyboard shortcuts can be added remains a really essential feature for any application.
As a workaround for the lack of a keyboard shortcut I was thinking of modifying the Scrivener files in the Scrivener .scriv-project directly with an external file editor (since in my case I need to bulk import a lot of those research notes as an prerequisite to an editing step of my writing -the ultimate goal being to have most - if not all - relevant resources together in Scrivener so I can do away with the constant multi-tasking and app-switching, and stay with the editing and writing process). However, I was unable to identify the place where those external bookmarks are stored. Is there any documentation of the file specification or is this even feasible?
And lastly I noticed that if I have more than one file-handler hyperlinks in the documents note page of the onenote:https://…-style and I click them one after the other they do open in OneNote, but the OneNote window does not get raised to the foreground if the application was already open or after the first click, which is a nag, too. So I think both the way URLs are handled by Scrivener as well as the external bookmarks feature may need yet a little more tweaking to becoming really useful (which doesn’t take away from the overal usefulness of Scrivener - one of my favorite pieces of software!)