At my 1st look at Scrivener found the “snapshot” feature really handy, since I thought of it as s.th. like the “label” feature in SourceSafe - saving and naming the status of your project an a specific time - so that you later can easily go back, work further on that given status, create several “branches” of the project … you got the idea.
Now I realize that this is only true for a single document, not for the project itself. Is this true, or did I overlook s.th.? Is there another feature that achies this?
I’m not sure what “s.th.” is an abbreviation for, so I might not be following everything you are asking about. Sith is the only thing that comes to mind, and while the Snapshot feature may not do what you are thinking of in terms of large-scale version control with trunks and merging and forking and all that, I can assure you there is no Dark Lord fulminating in it. Snapshots is more like a recorded “Save” function. You use it when you’d feel like saving, in other programs, and you get a track record of the saves.
If you prefer version control you may be interested to know that Scrivener’s support files are non-binary and work well with modern systems like Mercurial, Git, and Subversion (with a good front end as the deletions can be troublesome otherwise). Just bear in mind that Scrivener is not like a code folder where each file, inclusions aside, is largely self-contained. Trunks can be managed in code bases because swapping out one portion of code and merging with another is feasible. That’s not true in Scrivener because the files are more like database nodes. They are indexed and referenced, and so messing with merging two different radically different versions would almost certainly produce data loss or corruption.
You sent a copy of the whole project to a colleague? If that is what you mean, then the best thing is to use one of the meta-data features like you mentioned. Whenever you edit something, just mark it somehow and then you can search for that later on and merge the two projects together by opening them both at once and dragging changed items from one to the other. Snapshots probably won’t help you out a whole lot here. I like keywords for this as I can just add a keyword without disturbing any original use of them. I’m still not clear what you mean by “s.th”, but you seem to use it wherever the word ‘something’ could appear, is that right?
What you could do in that situation is send the other person a compiled (Ctrl-Shift-E) version of the project, so you wouldn’t need to send multiple versions of the Scrivener project, itself. It also means that the person reading your project wouldn’t need Scrivener. So when you need to apply changes, compile a new document.
Snapshots are more for your own use. If you want to change a section, but don’t know if you’d like it, you can take a snapshot before you change it, so you can restore later.
