When I drag a pdf in the research screen, it seems to import it and then it’s no longer readable. I’d just like to have a link to the pdf so that when I click on it, it opens in Acrobat.
I have about a fifty files that need to be linked, each needs to have a label, a description, bla bla bla … and the link to the file.
Is Scrivener capable of doing that?
Over4 years ago I used Scrivener to write my appeal brief and I won! Now I’m back in the appeals court, haven’t used Scrivener since 2016 and I’m struggling.
Regarding the manual, just press F1 (and skip past the erroneous cover page in the current build). Following the breadcrumbs there in the ToC, Preparation: Chapter 9, Gathering Material, is a good place to start. In the list of sections for this chapter, you’ll find §9.2, Linking to Research Material. That topic is probably going to be of interest to you. This approach puts the PDF into the binder, and as the manual puts it:
“In every way these items will act just like everything else you have imported or created in the binder—you can organise them into folders, give them index card text on the corkboard, tag them and work with them in splits.”
However the PDF remains linked to the disk, and if for some reason Scrivener can’t display it in the viewer, you can click a button to open it in a secondary viewer (you can do that with fully imported PDFs as well, by the way).
The other approach is to use Document Bookmarks, which you’ll find documented in §10.3, Project and Document Bookmarks. This involves a listing in the inspector sidebar itself, and is more useful for collections of PDFs pertaining to one topic. This is more like an actual bookmark, though there is a small previewer, you’d primarily be using them more for the double-click action to load them in a viewer. But you might prefer this approach if for some reason you don’t want to have linked PDFs in the binder.