I would like to insert bookmarks/notes at various places in my book. I’m trying to figure out how to, essentially, create a master list of bookmarks/notes that is always visible in the inspector pane so, no matter where I am in the book, they are visible and I can click them and jump to that specific place in the book. Basically an “always visible” master list of bookmarks in the inspector for every bookmark/note in the entire document.
I’m using the “comments” function to try and accomplish this. But, right now, I have to be in the actual chapter in the editor to see the comments in that chapter; and it shows comments for that chapter ONLY. Not very useful if, say, you want to trace a story thread that is hitting at certain beats at various places throughout the story.
Does anyone have any ideas how to do this? Thanks very much for any suggestions!
Unfortunately, you’re describing what the inspector comments will become at some later time. From what I’ve gathered, the technology underlying the editor portion of the window won’t support some intended behavior related to the ‘Scrivenings Mode’, where the editor displays more than one document as if they were all merged. One of the intended behaviors was to stack up the list of comments from all documents loaded to the editor. Another was to be able to select text across the boundary from one document to the next. There are probably other limitations.
The Lit & Lat folks have mentioned that fixing this will be a complete re-working of the code that deals with all of that stuff, but they haven’t announced when or at what stage that this work might begin or be delivered.
In the mean-time, you can get some of what you want, but not all of it, by splitting the editor and creating either 1 document with a list of comments todo items, or a series of individual documents. Using scrivener links to those documents, you can have that linked-to-document pop up in the other editor. it just won’t link in the other direction the way that inspector comments do.
If you want to pursue that solution further, let me know; if you are willing to go to more effort to set up and use some features of Scrivener, you can still accomplish something quite useful using Scrivener links, inline annotations, and frequent use of text searches.
You could also try combining collections and comments for this, by using some unique text in your comments so that you can search for them specifically, e.g. “ARC1: Blah blah blah” and then running a project search for text containing “ARC1”. This will give you a list of documents in the binder search results that have at least one comment bookmark for the arc, and you can select all there to load them in the editor, or take them one at a time. As you scroll through, you can use the comments in the inspector to go directly to your “ARC1” bookmarks.
You can also click the magnifying glass in the project search bar to save the the search as a collection that you can easily return to later.
(Side note: there’s a bug in 1.8.6 causing newly added comments and footnotes not to show up in search results, so if you’re not seeing documents you expect in the list, run Tools > Save and Rebuild Search Indexes.)
Thank you, Robert and MM, for the suggestions. The insertion, and subsequent search for, text phrases seems to be the most direct method for how my brain works!
So I tried a test and inserted “Lennie_arc” at the beginning of chapter 1 and at the beginning of chapter 2. They are there in the Comments & Footnotes on the right side.
I’m set up like this:
Novel
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter etc.
I clicked in the search window located at the top right (I’m in Windows), above the inspector pain (yes, pun intended!), selected Text (Exact Phrase) and searched for “Lennie_arc”
The binder, where my project hierarchy is, displayed a blank Search Results. There were no search results. What am I doing wrong?
The ability to save such searches into collections that I can easily access, and use as de facto bookmarks, seems to make sense.
This sounds like the bug I mentioned. Try choosing Tools > Save and Rebuild Search Indexes, then run the search again. Sorry for this inconvenience. It’s a bug that just crept in recently, and it’s on the priority list to fix so that newly added comments and footnotes appear immediately in search results as they should do.
Okay, yes! It works. Just have to use the Tools > Save and Rebuild Search Indexes routine with each new element I want to search. Thanks! Looking forward to the fix!
I’m not entirely sure how you’re using the comments here to bookmark sections. My original impression was that you wanted to tag different sections of text within a single document, and jump straight to those. If you’re trying instead to tag the full document, e.g. so you can bring up and read together all the documents pertaining to a particular arc, you could use keywords for this instead of comments (thus avoiding the bug). Keywords are added in the inspector pane; click the icon at the bottom with the key picture then + to add a new one. You can run a project search just for keywords and create the collection the same way you did for the comments.
Another option, that’s somewhere in between the two, is using inline annotations. These can be placed anywhere within the document and you could start them with “ARC1:” just as for the comments, so that you can use lots of different annotations throughout a document, then just search for the particular ones you want. This wouldn’t give you a little note in the inspector to click to jump straight to that spot, but you could easily jump to each instance via the regular Edit > Find > Find tool (Ctrl+F), with the F3 shortcut. You could limit the search term to finding only instances within annotations using the Find Formatting tool. This combined again with the search collection so you’re only looking at documents that do contain the “tag” should get you through pretty quickly. Like with keywords, using annotations would avoid the current bug searching new comments.
Yes… I’d like to be able to, essentially, tag the entire document (the “book”) to have an all-encompassing “master list” of “bookmarks” I can jump to with a click, so I can trace arcs/threads/etc. throughout the entire document.
Sounds like keywords may be a better option. I’ll move in that direction, and thanks so much for the help and insight!
It’s a bug that just crept in recently, and it’s on the priority list to fix so that newly added comments and footnotes appear immediately in search results as they should do.