Project version history – another hierarchy for snapshots

Scrivener Wish List
3

I do also think that duplicating the Draft folder in the binder, renaming it to “Book Name - Rev1” (or whatever) and then making your revisions inline in the Draft is going to be the simplest approach. It’s fundamentally the same kind of thing you’re doing in Word, when you use Save As and have a sequence of doc files for your revision—but like you say it avoids the whole issue of having different projects for no reason other than starting a new revision sweep.

I agree with you, it’s a messy way to work in general, especially when Scrivener has such a wide variety of tools for handling problems like this within the confines of one project. I’d say a vast percentage of the “help, Scrivener loaded an ancient version of my project!” questions you see around here are people accidentally loading old copies of the project.

When it comes to compilation, and thus organising things, there are two approaches you could take:

  1. If compiling old revisions is something you only do now and then, the most straight-forward approach is to simply swap the contents of the Draft folder with the revision folder you’re wanting to compile. You don’t need any kind of special setup for that, but it does involve a little more work each time you switch.

  2. If you frequently switch, then spending a little extra effort up front will be more efficient in the long run. For this approach, the idea is to put each revision into a subfolder beneath Draft, and hot-swap between them when you compile.

    Read more... 
    Draft/
	Revision 1/
		Chapter A
		Chapter B
		...
	Revision 2/
		Etc.
    1. At this point you should check the Section Types pane, in Project ▸ Project Settings..., and make sure everything is still lined up right with the new level of depth being added. So long as “Chapter A” remains what is was before this tweak (and any sections/subsections/etc. below that point), everything will be fine when you compile.
    2. Once you’ve got that set up, go into Compile, and in the Contents tab on the right, select the current master revision folder at the very top, ticking the Treat compile group as complete manuscript checkbox. Once you’ve done that, hold down the Option key and click the Save button, which will appear.
    3. The last thing you may want to tweak, if you use project goals, is to make sure that the option is set to only count the current compile group (otherwise it will count everything in every revision).

    So yeah, a little more setup—but now whenever you want to switch revisions, it’s a simple matter of changing that one dropdown in the compile window.

Now as for Snapshots, there is no way to make them work quite like you want in an efficient manner. Probably the best you could do is open up the Documents ▸ Snapshots ▸ Snapshots Manager window, search for your marker, and go through one by one clicking the “Roll Back” button. It’s hardly even worth considering in my opinion. Snapshots are better for keeping individual revisions safe, they aren’t really designed to orchestrate compiling different “editions” of the project. There are better tools for that throughout the software (the above method is only one of them).

Additionally, there’s some sort of comment of which state exactly this version represents, e.g. “before changing Charakter’s backstory”

The multi-folder approach described above (however you organise them) has a natural way of doing that of course. Since each revision is in its own folder, you can add all manner of annotation, synopsis and notes to the folder itself.

1 Like