I tried drag and drop - just in case it worked. It didn’t. How do I do that?
That will be the preferred mechanism once it is implemented, yes. This sort of move will transfer as much data as possible, including notes, synopsis card, snapshots and so forth.
What you should do now is export the material you wish to transfer to RTF files and then import them in the other project. If you only have one or two to transfer, copy & paste might be faster. The File/Export/Files... method will provide options for preserving meta-data, which you can use to populate the appropriate fields in the target project.
Thanks. Along the same lines can I now or will I be able to duplicate a project. It’s all the world building, language, images, character crap I want to duplicate for the next in a series. Oo, or can I save the project as a template and then delete the previous manuscripts?
That’s precisely the idea! The template system is above all meant to be used by you to create useful starter files that already contain everything you need to get started. The best way to make a template (or update an old one) is to do exactly as you describe. Strip out everything specific to the project to give yourself a clean starting slate.
Otherwise, duplication is pretty easy to do in Explorer. Remember these are all just folders and files, so if you want another copy, all you need to do is duplicate that root folder that ends in “.scriv”.
Thanks for that Ioa. That technique works but it imports the data back in alphabetically and not the original order so still involves a lot of work. I guess I am going to have to wait for drag and drop to get this data into the project. I guess you don’t know how much you use drag and drop until you can’t use it. sigh
Is it possible to reference documents inside other scriv projects within document references?
Technically, yes; they’re just files in folders like other files in folders on your computer. You can’t just drag them from your other project, though, so the tricky bit is that within the .scriv folder the documents are all titled numerically, rather than with whatever title you gave them in the project. You’ll have to hunt through them to find the one you’re looking for, but using a search for a unique string in the document or if Windows has a feature to quickly view the contents of a file (like Snow Leopard’s Quick Look on the Mac) will help you find it quickly.
So basically, you’re going to use “look up and add external reference” and then go to [projectname].scriv\Files\Docs and find the one you want. It’ll be treated according to the file type it is (.rtf, .pdf, etc.) and will have no reference to the Scrivener project it’s in.
Just be careful with this since it opens up the door to you modifying files within your project outside of Scrivener, and accidents could happen. You might be better off (certainly safer) to just copy the file out of the project or, if it’s something like a .pdf or other research document that you want to access from a lot of projects, keep it outside of all the projects and use the reference feature to link to it from all of them.