Regarding Snapshots—that is an approach as well, though it might be a little unwieldy for something like this since the snapshot covers the whole chunk of text at once. Be that as it may, the one downside you mention is actually not a huge problem because of that “Compare” button at the top of the Snapshot inspector tab. In comparison mode, you can use the arrow buttons that will appear alongside it to jump from one edit to the next, and tweak the granularity of comparisons with the gear button.
Inline annotations as a soft-delete
What you’re attempting to do is what I consider to be one of the prime advantages of Scrivener’s Inline Annotation feature. The idea is that the text you put into an inline annotation exists right within the context of the text around it, meaning that you can use the feature to selectively remove bits of text when compiling, without moving them.
To use it, simply select the text you want to remove (including the carriage return if it is a full paragraph—triple click works well for that) and hit the ⇧⌘A / Alt+Shift+F4 shortcut (or use Insert ▸ Inline Annotation). The text will be marked in a clear and easy to identify manner. Restoring the text is a very simple matter of using the same shortcut to toggle the annotation formatting back off. In conjunction with that is a helper tool: Edit ▸ Select ▸ Select Annotation, where you can just put your cursor anywhere inside the annotation and use that to select the whole thing and toggle it off. I use that often enough that I’ve assigned my own keyboard shortcut to the selection command. I use inline annotations to mark “things to do”, and selecting and deleting them is how I “mark them done”.
Another advantage to this method is that you can search for them. The Edit ▸ Find ▸ Find by Formatting... tool has an “Inline annotation” search method that can even isolate by colour usage or text found within the annotations. I use a special colour for “soft deletions” like this, so that I can readily see what I meant to accomplish with it, as opposed to my other many uses for this feature.
Striking out text
There is another approach you can take as well, and that is rather intuitively the strike-through feature (shortcut Ctrl+/ / ⇧⌘-). By default, text marked this way will continue to compile, but by setting Delete struck-through text in the general options tab of the compile overview window, you can turn that feature into a functional one. And if you use Revision markings (Format ▸ Revision Mode), strike-through will use the current revision colour.
While you’re looking at that area of compile, also not you can choose to print inline annotations rather than remove them. If you do want to see the full text, that option is available to you.
What if you well truly do not want the deleted text any more? You could go through and selectively delete them permanently, but both overstrike and inline annotation methods have mechanisms for permanent removal within the current selection:
- The
Edit ▸ Copy Special ▸ Copy Without Comments and Footnotesin fact includes inline stuff as well. Follow that up with a simple Cut and Paste to strip out all markings from the text. Naturally—not a good approach if you use footnotes! - The
Edit ▸ Text Tidying ▸ Delete Struck-Through Textcommand is the permanent version of the option in the compiler.
Now prior to do either of those would be an excellent time to make use of the Snapshots feature. 