As a newbie, I seem be unable to find how to create a link inside one document where I have the chapters to my book saved to a specific paragraph within another document I have saved in my references.
For example, I am writing about a court case for which I have a single document containing the court reporter’s transcript of the entire trial. From my narrative about the case, I want to be able to link to a specific witness’ testimony within the court transcript document. I know how to link to the entire document in Scrivener, but it is hundreds of pages long and that does me little good. How do I link to the beginning of a specific witnesses testimony buried somewhere deep within the transcript?
If it’s an option, I’d recommend splitting up the transcript into multiple documents within Scrivener. Assuming that that witness only testified once, you could put that testimony in its own document, likewise for the other witnesses &c. Then your binder and outline would give you a nice overview of the different stages of the case. I realize this isn’t addressing the question directly (and I don’t believe there is a way to link to a specific paragraph as far as I know) but what I am suggesting takes advantage of Scrivener’s organizational strengths. (It’s also the way I have handled a 600 page court transcript in my own work).
Scrivener can only link to documents, not destinations within them.
However, Scrivener allows you to break documents into arbitrarily small chunks – a paragraph or a sentence is fine – and use metadata to keep related chunks together. For example, I’ll break interview notes down so that each chunk focuses on one major idea, and use keywords to tag all chunks from a given conversation.
Thanks, Derick. That’s exactly how I had done it pending a response to this post with a better solution. It was actually pretty easy to break up the testimony. When a witness was recalled, I created another document with their name and “(Recalled)” affixed. Then I could create two links to their first and second testimony. It’s not too bad a workaround for court testimony; however, I miss the feature, as some documents might not lend themselves to being broken up like this. Thanks for responding.
That sounds like a promising approach. I’m not visualizing how to use metadata in this manner, but I’ll read the help files and see if this approach might help me when I need to mine down into a long document and link to an internal part. Thanks!
Basically, once you split the transcript down into smaller chunks, metadata such as Labels / Statuses, and particularly Keywords become much more useful, because they’re more specific.
Novelists often use the technique: for example, to look at only the scenes with Character X, or which contain a subplot. It sounds like it might be useful for your needs too.
Say you’re trying to track any mention of a specific item throughout the transcript: create a keyword (“Dagger”) and add the keyword to every one of your newly created documents where the dagger is mentioned (even if the word itself isn’t mentioned in the text).
You can create and save a dynamic search for this keyword, so you can pull out all the documents with ‘dagger’ keyword and see them together, just to track the progress of the dagger. The dynamic searches can also be compiled to print as well as being viewed in Scrivener.
The more you subdivide your transcript (within reason, of course), the more such metadata becomes useful, and the more Scrivener’s benefits compared to standard Word Processing software become apparent. Don’t forget, you can always assemble any number and combination of the smaller documents into temporary virtual ‘Scrivenings’ when you want the wider picture.
This is just a very quick overview of what’s possible with metadata: have a look at the Interactive Tutorial on the Help Menu. It will take an hour or two at the most, but it will give you a very good overview of the main concepts behind Scrivener (not just the metadata), which will really help you and save you a lot of effort in the long run.