I now sometimes edit manuscripts while away from my home computers (one Mac and one PC). From the Mac I’ve been using the Sync feature so that I can edit text files while away. I’m also using the revision markup with its different colored text. However, when I sync changes they come in as black rather than in the revision color.
I would like for the Sync feature to use the revision settings as if I had typed in those changes directly to Scrivener. So, for instance, when I Sync in First Revision the changes would be in red.
So you mean you are typing the text in red in the external editor, but the text isn’t appearing in red when you sync it? That’s strange, as it should just be importing the rich text exactly as it appears.
If you are after it detecting your changes and putting the changes in red automatically, however, that would be hugely problematic, as it is very difficult for a computer to compare two texts and determine exactly what has been inserted.
Hi, Keith. This is an old problem and completely solved at this time. Not to mean that it should be implemented into Scrivener, but just in case, are you familiar with the diff libraries?
It’s not really solved, although there are solutions mostly aimed at files containing code. Yes, of course I’m aware of diff - you’ll find another example in Scrivener itself, since Scrivener uses diff for snapshot comparisons. diff is plain text only, though, so while it works for showing rough textual differences between two snapshots in the inspector, it is not suitable for detecting ranges of changed text in rich text documents or for making reliable changes to them. Also, it works at the line level, so even if it were used to detect textual changes, it would highlight whole paragraphs that contained any changes, even if there were only a single word added or removed. (Scrivener’s snapshots comparison internally breaks all the text into lines containing single sentences or words in order to run it through diff, and provides several options for granularity since none return perfect results.)
The only thing that “solves” the problem of finding edits in rich text files down to the character level, to the best of my knowledge, is Track Changes, which works by monitoring changes to the text as they happen so is not applicable here.