Love the comments feature - v. useful for “notes to self”. Some questions:
Can I create a comment, and having created, jump back to the editor, only using the keyboard?
How do comment colours work? Do they default to the last-used highlight? Can I set a standard comment colour?
Is it possible for the comment text to show as default any text highlighted in the editor?
I’m currently working on a project with 50+ docs in the research folder and 20+ in Drafts, and I’m impressed with how easy organisation has become with the new outline functions and custom icons. Hats off for a great piece of software craftsmanship.
Yes: just tap Esc and you’ll be sent back to where you started.
Currently, they are always yellow, but I think this is being changed to remember your last choice—same way inline annotations work.
Could you rephrase that one? I’m not sure I follow what you are getting at. By default, the text you have highlighted when you create the comment is what will be scrolled too when clicking on the comment in the inspector.
Lovely. Is there an inbuilt shortcut to create a comment while in the editor?
I started off with yellow comments, but by some mysterious process they switched to white. Which I prefer, as it turns out. Now, sadly, they are yellow again …
Certainly. That was one of my less lucid moments. I’d like my new comments to automatically contain any text I have highlighted in the editor as a default, rather than my name and the date. Possible?
Yes, you can find all of the commentation features in the Format menu, but the one for comments specifically is Shift-Cmd-8 (remember it by thinking of it like adding an asterisk to your text).
That’s a little odd. White isn’t even amongst the default colours you get when right-clicking on a note.
Got it. Not a direct way, but it would easy to do. When you select the text you are highlight to make a comment on, just tap Cmd-C to copy the text, Shift-Cmd-8 to make a note, and Cmd-V to paste the text into the note (or maybe Shift-Opt-Cmd-V to do so without the main text formatting).
There seems to be a little oddness going on around the colour palette. See attached:
Re “Highlighter colours”: I added yellow, orange, green & blue, as per “Colour palette”. I didn’t add the two versions of Mercury, Off-White or Silver that appear in the custom highlighter section.
I did add a darkish grey I called “Delete”, but that has never appeared in my highlighter options …
White comments appeared soon after I tinkered with Off-White highlighting. Some cross pollination going on?
I’ll have to play with it, but the highlighter thing is probably a red herring. It’s more likely you had the notes accidentally selected and changed the colour with the palette. You can change the colour to whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be one of the pre-defined colours, those are just for convenience—and you can change a whole swath of them at once. The Mac colour palette is a floating entity which links up to anything that is active. It sends colour messages to the active thing, and if that thing responds to colour messages it will react. So you can open the palette for one thing, select something else (like switching focus to the inspector with the notes pre-selected) and then accidentally click anywhere that will produce a white result, and poof: white notes. But the next one you create should still be yellow.
As for the other colours in your highlight menu, those come from your custom swatches that you’ve dragged down into the system colour palette. Any colours you’ve dragged down there will show up in these menus. You don’t have to specifically add them to the Scrivener palette.
That could make things pretty crowded. I’ve only just re-loaded my computer with Snow Leopard, so I only have a few custom swatches. Before, I had several rows full of colours.
I’ll tinker and see if I can give you steps from yellow to white.
When adding a new comment, where does it get the name of the commenter from? I would like to change what it defaults to, since it uses the name I was born with and only use for legal documents and credit transactions, rather than the name I actually use.
White isn’t even amongst the default colours you get when right-clicking on a note.
