Hi, I’m considering buying Scrivener, and importing my project into it. At the moment I’m doing research what is possible…
I am now looking at ways to organise the project. I would like to keep my references outside the project, (but I can place them in its subfolder).
I work on two different computers, and on each of them, the project is on a different drive.
If I create my links to external resources on one computer, and then open my project on the other one, all my links will be broken, even if I keep the reference files in the same subfolder of the project, is that correct?
is it possible to have a relative path to references? What should I do if I want my project to be easily transferrable between two computers? using exactly the same paths to references on both is impossible.
I also don’t like the automatic saving feature as it constantly overwrites my files, I prefer to
have more control over when I save. Is it possible to change the settings somewhere?
Not at this time. The problem is that References use URLs to communicate with the rest of your computer. A URL points at a web page most often, but as you may know they can also point to files and other things. Unfortunately URLs that point to files must describe the full location of that file—which includes everything down the drive letter. We will try to implement relative linking in the future, but for now the best approach is to decide upon a “home station” if you are going to rely extensively on links over the portability that importing into the project itself affords you.
This is a safe way to work, nothing will “break” while the project is on the other computer, you just won’t be able to load the files that it links to directly, by double-clicking on the icons. Once you return to the home station then requesting “file:///D:/stuff/file.pdf” is valid again and works when you double-click.
It’s not possible (you can increase the timer to the point of uselessness in settings, but you’ll never escape the fact when you close the project it will save—this program is more like OneNote, not Word), but as you can imagine the software has been designed around this concept, and I would advocate a much safer approach than just not saving at all for a while and then when you finally do save, blowing away the old version of the file forever. Instead, one has Snapshots. Save when you want to, and come back to that save point five years from now and resurrect a forgotten paragraph from it. See §15.6, Using Snapshots, pg. 154, in the user manual for more information. And, if you want a more comprehensive “save point” than that, you can use the File/Back Up/Back Up To… menu command to set aside a copy of the project as it currently stands.
So if you were on two separate machines and each had the same path to the same file, the link would work? It’s not hard at all to change drive letters, or even to create partitioned drives with specified letters.
So, for example, substitute drive S: for a folder that holds the files you want to link to. Note that when you reboot, the substituted folder is lost, but you can set things up so that during startup the substitution is made again.
I also don’t like the automatic saving feature as it constantly overwrites my files, I prefer to
have more control over when I save. Is it possible to change the settings somewhere?
Use the backup feature for this. I back up frequently to the cloud, and have literally 326 backups of my current project.
Thanks for posting the tips! I figured there had to be a way to get around that, but I’m mostly just familiar with the techniques used on the Mac (which doesn’t have drive letters, but you do still have disk names that need to be normalised). Another thing some people do is keep their research on a portable drive that they plug into whatever computer they are working on. With all platforms you can keep such a drive consistently addressed, everywhere you go.
One extra note with this. If you’re storing/moving reference files with your Scrivener project, be sure that they’re not inside the project’s .scriv folder. Put them in a separate folder that’s a sibling to the .scriv folder, and put both those folders in another that you can move around if needed. The .scriv folder is monitored by Scrivener and it treats everything inside as part of the project when using Backup or Save as, so you don’t want extra files in there muddling it up.
Instead, one has Snapshots. Save when you want to, and come back to that save point five years from now and resurrect a forgotten paragraph from it. See §15.6,