I’ve discovered that Scrivener is an amazing tool for managing investigations—organizing, curating, tagging and annotating legal documents and exhibits. However, I often need to share documents with others. It would be extremely helpful to be able to “Reveal in Finder” any specific document or documents from the hundreds I have in my project. As near as I can tell, I’m only able to reveal the single file that serves as the entire project package file.
Is there a document-specific “Reveal in Finder” feature or other workaround to easily get to the source document on drive?
You are looking for the File ▸ Export ▸ Files... command, if you want to share bits of the project with someone—or if the intention is to give them the ability to edit parts of it, the File ▸ Sync ▸ with External Folder... menu command, which lets you set up a “watch folder” in a share somewhere with two-directional editing and automatic syncing.
Editing internal pieces of the project format directly is asking for corruption or data loss, which is why there is no command that makes it easy to do that. Best to think of the project as a singular format, distributed into files for performance reasons, but something that should be treated no different than a .docx “file” (which is also a bunch of files, though packaged into a zip archive). While an expert may go into a .docx file and manually modify it, you won’t find any commands in Word that let you do that.
Thank you AmberV. I’m not interested in giving others access to the project or the ability to edit any of the documents in it. I’d like the ability to easily locate and of the hundreds of PDF source documents I’ve imported into the project and then copy the source document into an email to send to others.
I’m using Scrivener as the exclusive document management tool for the investigation exhibits rather than keeping two streams of documents—one in Scrivener, the other elsewhere on my hard drive.
I think Export in that case is the best tool for what you want to do if you intend to attach PDFs. Just drop them into a temporary folder somewhere so they can be easily attached. I have a folder in my user directory called “outbox” for just this kind of purpose, that has its contents deleted weekly.
The folder sync feature I refer to is just for text editing anyway—but to clarify on one point it can be quite selective. It has an optional filter setting whereby you could even limit access to one particular binder item at a time. But that’s academic at this point.
Thank you very much, Amber! It worked. While it would be ideal to have a “Reveal in Finder” right-click option for documents in the project, this is a decent workaround.
FWIW, I use DevonThink as my research database, in parallel with Scrivener as my writing environment. DT does include a Reveal in Finder command, and IMO is generally better at handling large (millions of words, in my case) volumes of mostly static data.
While this is indeed true, we caution people that it is not meant for general use with imported files. With imported files, you are exposing the data in the internals of a database. Modification of the internals of a DEVONthink database should not be done.
I’d also like to keep one set of PDFs outside of Scrivener (but accessible within Scrivener) so I can us other forms of markups.
I saw a 15 yo video that suggests the command ‘open in external editor’ so may try that approach, but immediately wanted to ‘reveal in finder’ so I can change the default for my pdf from preview (on mac) to Acrobat.
The default tool for opening PDFs (or any other file type) is a system setting based on the file extension. There’s no need to dig inside the Scrivener project to change it, nor do we support doing so.
“Research files as aliases” is the supported mechanism for maintaining research files outside of Scrivener.
In addition to fixing your system defaults to Acrobat, which you probably want to do anyway, if you right-click on the Open in External Editor button, in the footer bar, you can set Scrivener to use something other than the system default, for all files of that kind.