I was about to post a bug report about losing Project References. But I first looked through the existing bug reports and didn’t see any previous mention of the problem. This made me suspicious of my own behavior. I closed out the program and restarted it. I reopened the project in question. Still no project references. Damn. Then, light dawned. I clicked the References icon in the Inspector pane and my Project References appeared. Happy, albeit somewhat abashed, user smiles meekly and goes on about his business.
But the experience did bring up an issue for me. The reason I was confused was because the last things I had seen before I closed the project were my Project References. And as a user, my expectation was that when I opened the project, it would look like it looked when I closed it. I think this is a valid user expectation upon project open.
So that expectation brings me to my feature request. Could Scrivener (at least on Windows) please open a project in the state in which it was closed? Among other things that I wouldn’t know to ask for, It would at least require saving the full state of the Inspector (whether Notes or References were being displayed, if References which references were being displayed, whether or not a Reference item was selected, if so which one, etc.) which Scrivener does not do today.
You are absolutely right (and for exactly this reason! It makes it look like you lost your work if you don’t squint at the header label close enough), this should be persistent between sessions; same goes for Document vs. Project Notes. I’ve made a note of it for the list.
Yes, this is all on Lee’s list; there’s a whole slew of specific inspector consistency behaviors that aren’t quite right at the moment but will defintiely be implemented by release, if not earlier. (He’s working his way through the list but I haven’t checked recently to see if this has been fixed for the next beta or not; theoretically, I’m on vacation…)
There is a project/document references bug where in specific circumstances new items that are dragged into the list can disappear–it won’t affect older items, and it only happens if you drag to the list and then type in the document or switch to the other reference type without doing anything between. That’s been logged and Lee was working on that one the other day so it should be corrected for the next version.
(Incidently, since you had reported that other bug–thank you!–did it turn out that in that case you hadn’t actaully lost the references, but that it was this inspector inconsistency that was the problem?)
That project is now in a state where I was testing the “web page width is altered” bug, so I can’t be sure.
But I think I just lost a project reference trying to see if references were intact. When I opened the project, I had one project reference. After I fooled around (sorry for not being more structured) by clicking on various text documents in the binder and switching between notes and references a few times, the project reference was gone. Sorry, I can’t tell you the exact sequence that caused it.