I bungled and irreversibly redacted part of the Scrivener user manual which is called up by “⌘ ?”. It’s still there, but parts are missing.
How could I regenerate the manual, ie not only download from the web but also linked to the “⌘ ?” shortcut ?
thanks in advance for your time and help
With Scrivener in the foreground, holding CMD ? (CMD SHIFT .) I get the Help menu selected, with the cursor in the search field.
Are you talking about the same manual you get from the Help->Scrivener Manual? If so, I assume the easiest way to get that back is to download a fresh copy of Scrivener and drag it into Applications after quitting Scrivener. I don’t know where in the application bundle the manual is stored, or what it’s named, but I wouldn’t recommend fiddling with files within an application when you have an easier fix available.
thank you but won’t that mess up my Scrivener preferences ? It should be no big deal to re-download the manual and put it where it belongs.
No, you don’t have to worry about your settings. Your preferences are stored in a folder under your account (/Users/youruseridhere/Library/…). That folder is normally hidden from users, so it’s hard to fiddle with by accident, but that’s where application configuration files are.
Some applications that require running an installer might wipe out settings on a re-install (or might require an un-install) that would remove those user settings, but Scrivener re-installs are just a drag and drop operation, from the dowloaded file into the Applications folder.
FYI, if you are in the habit of marking up your manual, you should probably download a separate copy anyway; when they eventually issue an update to Scrivener, the PDF manual stored in the program’s application bundle will be replaced with a fresh (potentially updated) copy. That would wipe out any highlights or other annotations you might add.
good points. thanks very much !!
A neat trick for doing that is to open the manual normally in your PDF reader, and then drag its icon from the Title bar at the top of the window, out to the Desktop, or wherever you prefer to put it. Just hold down the Option key while dragging, so the pointer has a green “+” icon on it—that will make a new copy of the PDF where you drop it (the default these days is to create an alias, which would defeat the purpose).
thanks very much Ioa. A nice trick to know.