Hi
Besides for writing, Scrivener can be an extremely helpful application for knowledge-management. While I write down my conclusions in Scrivener, I can easily attach my sources such as locally stored and annotated PDFs and URLs, either in the Document References section or directly by Edit>Add Link. Now I’d like to motivate my teammates to work on Scrivener and to use my database/project-file. My only problem is: Is there any possibility to get the links to local files (such as PDFs) running on another machine? I’m already keeping all related local documents in one folder as close as possible to the root folder (in “Documents”), to minimize problems when I rename my folders. But when I copy my Scrivener file and all related documents to another Mac (or my new Mac named differently) the path doesn’t work, because the Username is different ([file://localhost/User/](file://localhost/User/)myname/Documents/filename). And on a Windows machine the path differs even more. Is there any solution to change all file-pathes in my project?
Thank you so much for your ideas!
What I do is create a symbolic link in /Users pointing from the alternate user name to the actual user folder. So for instance if you have Machine A which has files located in /Users/machinea/Documents/Research, and Machine B has a ‘machineb’ user name, then using Terminal, type in:
cd /Users
sudo ln -s machineb machinea
This creates a link called ‘machinea’, so that when you double-click on a Reference in Scrivener pointing to ‘…/machinea/…’, it finds the file in ‘…/machineb/…’ so long as everything else is the same as well.
A better solution though is to put research files on an external disk (for yourself) or file server that everyone has access to (for teamwork). This way the path will be the same from all machines accessing the data. The will be linked to /Volumes/DiskOrNetworkShare/Path/To/Research/….
Windows is another matter entirely; don’t even bother. The different path syntax means you can’t set up a cross-platform linking scheme that will work on both platforms—without hacking the Scrivener text files with some form of automation.
The only other alternative is to have everyone set up their own links as needed. So if they come across a Reference they want to access, they can look up the name of the file from its URL, then drag in their own link so it can be easily used in software. Everyone could use the Description field to put their name in the link.
Anyway, the software clearly isn’t meant to serve as a team-based file management database. 