Scrivener is almost perfect for me.
However I feel there are two missing features:
Allowing to make very basics annotations on PDF, like comments, highlights and drawings. These annotations would be readable in PDF readers.
The possibility to arrange notes in a unlinear way in coarkboard view (or in a completely new view). It would be a little bit like a mind mapping software, but of course with much more basic possibilities. It would just be possible to reorganize notes like on a photography lightbox and maybe to connect them with lines and arrows. This would be very helpful to structure a text: sometimes it’s better to do it in a linear way, sometimes not.
These features would in my opinion crown Scrivener as the best writting and oganizing software ever…
You can already do both of these, almost. Editing PDFs you need to do externally, but it is really easy to do. Just click the little application icon in the footer bar at the bottom, and it will load in your favourite PDF editor. Annotated it, then save it and the changes will show up in Scrivener (you will need to click the refresh button to see them). I’m afraid that’s about as good as it is going to get. The PDF viewer is provided by the Mac, so we are limited in what it can provide. It doesn’t have a lot of flexibility for adding features to it.
Freeform corkboards do exist, though you’ll need to use grouping not lines. Again, in the footer bar on the right-hand side you’ll find a toggle switch that can flip between modes. These are per folder, so one folder can be arranged however you like with no bearing on the binder order (though you can convert a freeform board to a linear board), and another can be linear.
Actually, it’s possible to add a lot more annotation functionality to it - Preview and Skim are built on the same PDF viewer - but it takes a lot of coding as it doesn’t come “for free” and would require a lot of extra interface. And Scrivener isn’t a PDF editor, it’s a writing tool, so it leaves external editors that are built for this sort of thing to handle it instead. For the same reason, Scrivener’s web page viewer isn’t a full browser and its image viewer isn’t an image editor - it would be insane to try to turn Scrivener into a full editor for every file type it can view. Instead, it focuses on the writing tools, which is what it was built for.
And even Skim doesn’t actually alter the PDF the way I understand it. It draws these elements on top of the PDF view on demand. That would be a way of handling it, but like Skim your annotation system wouldn’t be recognised in standard PDF viewing applications. For that you’d have to code a PDF writer (which Skim does, but it doesn’t adjust the original PDF, it writes a completely new one). Preview is another matter, it actually does edit the PDF, but that’s Apple, they can do whatever they like to the kit.
Thank you for your explanations.
About PDF annotations: I perfectly understand why you do not want to implement this functionality. And of course a (very) good writing software is much better than a heavy and complicated program wich do everything. However when we use Scrivener to take notes like I do (among other) it’s more convenient to not have to switch between programs to annotate a PDF…
About the coarkboard: I had not noticed this possibiliy. It’s almost exactly what I was looking for… It only lacks the arrows…
Yeah, the problem is what the arrows should mean. They as a concept do not match up well with the existing linking systems in Scrivener (at least not without greatly ramping up the complexity of the corkboard feature, beyond what I feel most people would be comfortable with).
You might check out Tinderbox, especially now that it can import whole .scriv projects. If you’ve arranged documents on a freeform corkboard it will convert those arrangements to its own mapping system. If the project has settled down structurally, it’s very feasible to run two models side-by-side in each program. If new objects are appearing in one system or another then syncing becomes slightly more difficult, but it’s not too bad. You can export new structures from Tinderbox using it’s Scrivener targetting OPML output template, and besides the .scriv import, you can also export smaller structures from Scrivener as OPML and drop them into Tinderbox. So it’s not too difficult to keep both systems up to date with each other.
Ditto that. Scrivener will highlight an original PDF document, but not an alias.
That means I have to use up space on my hard drive to store an additional copy of the document in Scrivener, or move all my library of documents to Scrivener.
I would rather have my library documents stored in a folder on my slave drive, and not have them stored in Scrivener.
Also, the highlight command is defective. It will only highlight one line at a time. If more than one line is highlighted, the command only highlights part of it. You have to highlight one line at a time, a real pain when highlighting multiple lines/paragraphs.
A highlight command is cumbersome and not as handy as toolbar controls.
Also, there is no way to draw boxes, use different colors to highlight what I want to quote, and what I want to paraphrase, etc. I’d like to be able to make notes in Scrivener with comments off to the side in the inspector window, where I paraphrase.
The button on bottom toolbar is handy for opening an external PDF app, but the functionality of Skim is lost, because Scrivener does not recognize highlighting or other annotations in Skim unless document is flattened.
After flattening, there is no way to make changes in Skim to highlighting or other annotation, so once again there’s duplicate documentation, flattened document for Scrivener, and Skim original document.
It would be a lot handier to have Skim integrated with Scrivener.
It’s open source after all, so the code should be available.
We can’t devour open source code and then sell it. And Scrivener is not a PDF editor - it’s just not intended for that, sorry.
I can’t reproduce the highlight bug, though - when I select several lines, the Highlight command highlights all of them. It calls through to Apple’s PDFKit to do this, so I wonder if this is a PDFKit bug on an earlier version of OS X - what version of OS X are you running?
