Ideas to keep the document interoperable with other editing tools (checking in and out)

Scrivener
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This is a follow up to my previous post that focused on the practicalities of checking out the document from Scrivener for an offline edition in my nomad tool, and then checking in again the doc (keeping track on what’s in Scrivener, still the reference, or out and thus out of sync too).

As my project’s documents will move back and forth in such external tool with limited capabilities, I need to adjust the features I’ll be using to keep them interoperable.

Example: Although I started using some footnotes, I’ll have to revert them into something else, otherwise I’ll loose those completely.

Since I often have for each documents (=fragments of chapter) a series of notes, to-do, potential additions, etc, I thought I would extensively use the notes (bellow the synopsis) instead of anything else.

And so , for the footnotes, I’ll manually add a “(1)” next to the word, and write the “(1) text of the footnote” in the notes, along with the rest. Numbering is local to the doc, and I rarely have any footnote.

A need to adapt to my target tool, which is the Remarkable 2: infinite page height, several pages allowed.

So I’ll move my Scrivener information like this:

1- Doc name = doc name in RM2.

2- Page 1: the document’s text (copy/paste in html)

3- Page 2: the document’s notes (copy/paste as text)

4- The synopsis: I’ll compile them all separately in another doc, manually exported, and I’ll sync those manually too. Not that often.

Besides footnotes, I have the highlight in both tools that doesn’t get copied both ways. I’ll replace this with some custom markers, like << xxxxxx >> , maybe?

Any other feature that I’m forgetting and that I might loose during the transfer?

I’ll be glad to hear any suggestion or experience and feedback with working on two different tools.

Thanks!

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My best advice is to use one tool to write. If Scrivener doesn’t do it for you, then chose something else.

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For me there are really two kinds of activities.

  • The long writing and the deep editing. Focused and immersed. I don’t need much for that, but I want to be able to do it whenever I feel like it. Nomad (light weighted and slim), outdoor in the sunlight, with no power source (camping), handwriting or typing. A plus if the work is still saved in the cloud each time it gets wifi or connection sharing (I’ve lost some papers…).
  • The organizing and small editing (also with grammar tools). Over 110 docs for the draft, more to insert somewhere, I need to see the big picture, thus the big screen and mouse.

For the former activity, the Remarkable 2 works well for me. Using Scrivener would mean buying a PC (or Mac), carry it everywhere, daily charging, more distraction with it, no handwriting.

For the latter, Scrivener is great (as you know). With Remarkable this is really hard to manage at this level of complexity, and it’s not very responsive. I tried but it’s not suited for that. With Scrivener, and to address the lack of personal computer, I just borrow some PC and connect to my cloud PC with Scrivener in it, so it’s still semi-nomadic (and main storage safer in the cloud).

I’m really fond of this setup :hugs: and maximizing the advantages in both activities hopefully offsets the inconvenience of doing some manual sync.

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This may not work for you precisely, because it sounds like you are attempting to organise multiple fields (synopsis, notes, text), and the external folder sync tool only works on the main text—plus (I could be wrong) but I don’t think Remarkable quite works with the “loose files in a sync folder” concept?

But, just for the sake of anyone coming across this thread that might be interested solely in the text content, and this idea in general: if you are using the external folder sync feature, there is a neat capability that it has in its feature set, to only sync items within a certain Collection. What makes that useful for what you are doing is that collections can of course be derived from search results.

With that in mind, consider the following setup:

  • A Custom Metadata field of the Checkbox type, called “Checked Out”.
  • A search collection which is set to search for “Yes”, with the scope set to the “Checked Out” metadata field.
  • In the external folder sync setup tool, the checkbox enabled to only sync items within a certain collection, using the above collection as its source.

Now you have something that will automatically keep the sync folder trimmed to those items that have this checkbox ticked.

You may want to use some other criteria though. Labels are particularly useful if you are doing a lot of this, as they can be set to tint icons, binder rows, index cards and so on. A hot red flag on an item that is checked out is a pretty solid way of making sure you don’t accidentally edit the content in two places at once, whereas a checkbox (while certainly more convenient to toggle with a single click), is largely constrained to either being in the Inspector, or added as an Outliner row. It’s a bit less visible, a bit less of a warning to leave it alone.

And so , for the footnotes, I’ll manually add a “(1)” next to the word, and write the “(1) text of the footnote” in the notes, along with the rest. Numbering is local to the doc, and I rarely have any footnote.

The other thing that the sync folder tool can help you with there, if enabled in the Sharing: Sync options tab, is to convert {{Text like this}} into a footnote upon sync, and for all footnotes in the main text to be converted to this syntax when written to the disk (you will note you can also annotate, from how that setting is labelled).

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Thanks for your thoughtful answer!

Labels: I already revamped those into 10 “progress” stages with colored dots in the binder. One could argue that if the document is being edited outside, its progress should be reassessed anyway, so I could make a pseudo progress “out”. But only this one would change the doc icon (what I’m doing currently). I’ll see if it works.

Sync folder + collection: noted! I’ll see if it’s not too ambitious to code some converter to export to Remarkable’s folder and if the latter can accept a batch of files (maybe with a trick).

Footnotes: interesting! Maybe, otherwise it can be handled manually, I’ll have at most 8-10 footnotes in the 120k novel.

I also had another idea, for the export:

Use a custom compile format for an output that another tool will process (keeping the text of notes and other non-manuscript elements).

Compile can be limited to a collection too, probably. I’ll have to look for the formatting options.

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Yes, collections can be used to filter compile, or to establish its base data source upon which further filtering is done.

For scripting, do bear in mind that with tuning the compiler can be set up to export data, rather than “documents”. You might not want or need to take it that far, into the realm of creating valid JSON or XML, but for example using a simple system of markers in a text file, like >>>> BINDER NAME to split apart outline chunks, or further break down notes and synopsis data from within those sections, would be a cakewalk for anyone that knows a scripting language.

Such a script can then be attached to your compile settings, when using TXT or Markdown-based outputs.

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