Linking to external files

I’m new to Scrivener (loving it so far), and have a question about linking from documents to files residing on my computer. I have Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

When I’m working in a document, I can use the Edit > Link command to get to a linking dialog. Adding links to Websites from this works perfectly. However, inserting a link to a file seems not to work. Blue linked-looking text appears, and the cursor over it has the hand appearance, but clicking on it doesn’t do anything.

I gather from the manual, sec. 11.2, p. 85, that this may be intentional: “In order to reduce confusion in the binder, linked items cannot be directly placed into the binder. They must be inserted into the references table for another item.” And indeed when I insert a link to a file in the Document References section of the Inspector it works fine. But if that’s what one is supposed to do, why is File present as an option in the Link dialog at all?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer for my confusion!

This should work and there’s just a bug whereby a third “/” is missing from the initial “file://” prefix. If you add an additional slash at the beginning of your file link, that should get them working properly, and I’ve got this on the bug list. Thanks!

The manual section you quote is about placing links within the binder, the sidebar on the left where you have the list of created and imported documents. You can’t add a links to that, but rather should add them in the inspector’s Reference area, as you’ve seen. Adding links directly into a text document doesn’t list them in the binder, so you can have whatever links you want in the text itself.

does trial version have sync feature?

Thank you! What a prompt response; and adding the / at the beginning of my file specification caused it to work perfectly.