I’ve tried searching for this feature (in the manual and the forums) without luck…so if it already exists, my apologies
I would like to be able to reuse text in two or more places throughout a document, but have them linked in a way where if I modify the text in one place, that change occurs everywhere (sort of like a variable that can be output in multiple places).
I can imagine a number of cases where this would be useful, but the specific example I’m working on is a proposal for a set of laws.
The document begins with the proposed laws, then is followed by in-depth chapters that repeat one provision and explain in it-depth with supporting research.
Of course I could copy-paste (which introduces the problem of manually syncing any changes I make), or create the combined proposed law after all of the supporting documentation and wording is finalized, but just linking the text from a single source is more ‘intuitive’ for me.
It would be really nice if “variables” of this sort displayed the text that they referenced while simultaneously having some sort of visual cue that indicates the content was a variable (specific colored text, a symbol at the start of the first word of the fragment/sentence/paragraph/page being referenced that, when hovered over, showed from where this content originated and could even be clicked on to take the user to that location, etc.).
There are a ton of uses for something like this ranging from technical writing for company manuals/software user guides to authors compiling encyclopedias for their works to businesses that reuse content over and over again that they compile for multiple clients.
Copy/paste is useful, but it can be a nightmare for someone with a lot of content that they need to replicate, and, let’s be honest, linking like this is (or, at least, could be) just easier.
Something like this will be coming in Scrivener 3. It’s basically an <$include> tag that allows you to tag for inclusion the text of any other document in the project. This way, you could write some text in one document, and then include that text in other documents simply by using the <$include> tag with a link to that document.
