I’m a doctoral student in English literature, working on my dissertation. When I finish drafting a chapter in Scrivener, I export it to RTF, use Bookends for citations and bibliography, then save it as a Word document for my supervisor, who uses an old version of Word and who isn’t particularly tech-savvy. When she gets back to me with comments, they are invariably embedded in Word as Word comments. Now, I hate Word and use it only as a last-step export option when sending files to other people, but I want her comments, which are tagged to specific lines of text in a 60-page chapter. I also don’t want to have both files on my screen at the same time while I’m doing revisions. So I manually add her Word comments as Scrivener comments to the appropriate sections of my chapter and work from there, changing the highlight colour of a comment to green when I have addressed the comment.
So now we come to my request: the ability to use the Comment tool of Scrivener as a very basic task manager. As an ex-software-tech writer, I approach my own revisions as bug lists, and accordingly, would like to assign each of my supervisor’s comments a priority (high, medium, low) and status (done, not done, ignored). Moreover, I would love to be able to view all comments for a given chapter in something like the Scrivener outline window, making it easy for me to track my revision progress (and to change the status of any and all comments from a single window, with just a few clicks). Lastly, I’d like to be able to zoom in and out on Comments the same way you can zoom for the main view.
I realize that my use case is probably not everyone’s, but if anyone out there wants to use Scrivener comments in the same way…
Another alternative might be to break your manuscript into chunks, based on which sections have comments assigned, and then use Scrivener’s Label and Status commands to keep track of the state of those chunks.
I already use Labels to control output. And I have a lot of comments to track, so I’m not sure Status and chunking is the way to go for me. I’d basically just like more functionality in the Comment tool.
I think you can manage something of what you’re looking for by combining your own codes with ‘Find by Formatting’.
At the beginning of each comment, include a short code that won’t be confused with anything in your real text (e.g. @@H-D for High Priority Done, @@M-I for Medium priority ignored etc…).
Then select Edit > Find > Find by formatting (ctl-opt-cmd-F). In the three drop down boxes, select Find: Comments and Footnotes; Search in: All Documents (or Selected Documents to taste), and Type: Comments respectively, then enter one of your codes. E.g. to see all comments, irrespective of status enter @@; to see just the high priority ones @@H and so on…
All the relevant comments will be dispayed in the Inspector. You can move between each comment using the dialogue box buttons, or you can dismiss the dialoge (ESC) and use shift-opt-cmd-G / ctl-opt-cmd-G or simply double-click in the comment to amend it as appropriate.
This will give you the basic functionality to track individual comments and to see them all in the inspector window.
Dave that is a brilliant idea! Any way to split the screen and put all the comments in a side screen? or hide them in text until you want to view them?
@wordchiseler: The Mac version has both Comments (in the Inspector) and Annotations (in-line in the text), while ARAIR the Windows version only has Annotations at the moment.
@AJlight: I’m sorry, I don’t have the Windows version. From memory from previous version on the Mac, you can put annotations into ‘ghost mode’ (fade their colour till they are not so obvious), but I don’t think you can hide them. But you can still use some of the ideas in my post (such as the codes, which I nicked from an idea by AmberV on this forum ages ago…) in Annotations as well.
