I’ve suddenly started using clippings - from external sources AND from within a Scrivener project. Couple more small things come to mind.
(1) I trust Scrivener. I don’t need it to come to the front and grab focus whenever I clip to it from an external source.
(2) If it is going to come forward, though, can it do so with the insertion point at the end of the document, after the just-clipped-thing?
(3) The ability to Clip And Match Style (or plain-text clip, even) would be nice.
The nicest thing though is that I keep finding great new stuff in Scrivener and thus great new ways to use it. My workflow is almost human-comprehensible these days.
On (1), is that just a OS X works this way thing, or a convention? Because a single Dock-bounce would be enough to alert the user that their intended operation was successful, I think.
Thanks for adopting and considering michael’s suggestions, which I second. I guess this really belongs in wish list, but as long as you’re fiddling with clippings anyway, how about an option (maybe by holding down the option key or something) to assign each clipping to a particular Scrivener project, instead of just the one that happens to be in front?
If summoning a dialogue box that allows you to choose among any Scrivener projects, open or not, is too hard to implement, maybe it could list only those that are open. I clip to various projects all day and always have to stop my research and check which Scrivener project is open to make sure the clipping is going to the right home. Other than that, Scrivener is just about perfect in every way, for my uses at least.
I am very new to Scrivener (newbie would be a compliment)…
Anyway, I am interested in the “clippings” ability. I have not used it yet (currently I use Journler for general clips, but I would like to use Scrivener for specific clips pertaining to my specific project). Can someone explain how this works? Do I just drag text from a document or web page to the Scrivener icon in the dock? What exactly happens to that info.? Does each clipping create a new document?
Sorry for the basic questions, just trying to get the most out of the software.
Brett - it’s much more difficult to get things sent to a specific project, so this won’t happen (at least not in any 1.x release in the near future). There’s not going to be much change to clippings at all, in fact, beyond what I already said. Sorry.
Thanks, Keith. Being clueless about anything that goes on under the hood of a computer, I have no idea of the technical difficulty involved in my breezily hopeful requests, so of course I understand if this isn’t feasible any time soon (or ever) – and I certainly don’t want anything to get in the way of your novel writing, which is the whole reason you made Scrivener in the first place! I feel almost guilty using it several hours per day, realizing that my massively increased productivity (discounted by time spent on these forums) comes , to some extent, at the expense of your creative writing. The dozen or so seconds per week this feature would save me aren’t worth bothering about if it’s too hard to implement any time soon. (The same goes for a similar request made awhile back: have the clipping automatically include the URL of the source in document notes or at the end of the clipping.)
So thanks again for Scrivener as is, which is far more than any of us have a right to expect, and good luck on getting this version wrapped up so you can turn to the end to which Scrivener, as wonderful as it is, is only a means.
Oh, and to PR, you can clip text from a web page or email or any other source via the Services menu. Just select the text you want, then go to Services => Scrivener => Append clipping to Create New Clipping from Selection or Append Selection to Current Text Document. It’s one of Scrivener’s most useful features for those of us who do a lot of research online to build our stories.
Keith – just noticed this feature in the new version of EagleFiler:
Added “Capture with options” command (Option-F1 by default),
which lets you set the library, destination folder, tags, and
other metadata right when you press the capture key.
That’s pretty much what I’m looking for. I don’t think it’s such a high priority for me that I want to buy EagleFiler, but perhaps Michael could offer you some guidance on how to do it in Scrivener?
I have to say a massive thank you to Christian and Eric at Devon-Technologies here. The default behaviour of OS X services is to bring the app to the front, and I couldn’t find an obvious way around this. So, I e-mailed DT to ask if they would mind giving me any pointers. They got back to me straight away and Christian very kindly shared the portion of code in DEVONthink that does this with me. So, in the next update, Scrivener will be able to stay in the background when you use the clippings services - and this is all thanks to Devon-Technologies. I know loads of you use DEVONthink for storing all your cross-project research, so be sure to thank them and tell them how cool they are whenever the occasion arises.
So, thank you Christian and Eric - I really appreciate it!
One more thing on the subject… it would be really nice to have a Scrivener service to <Clip/Append selection to current document NOTES>. Very useful for data harvesting, instead of having either a special Notes document for every working document, or tons of Clippings all called “Clipping [date time]”.
