Hello,
long time Scrivener user.
I was wondering if it will be possible to annotate metadata text with a rich-text format.
I would love to be able to highlight (or bold/underline etc) metadata, especially when it is in the outlining mode. This would be such a welcome addition for me (others, too?) when synthesising information, say for a literature review (I use outliner as I would use an excel sheet).
I know you can change the colour of the metadata text, but that would be for the whole block of text. Not helpful if I only want to pick out a few words or so from that field.
What sort of metadata field are you making that has so much text you need to highlight some of it? Might your need be the result of using the wrong tool — as in maybe you are using a metadata field for a purpose better suited to the Notes area (or the body text of an index card)?
These are the questions that came to my mind from your post.
believe me, I have agonized over what would be the easiest way to do what I want, and have lost days of research trying to find the best solution.
So, for my example - writing a literature review, I would have however many sources displayed in the outliner. I create a number of metadata fields for certain topics, such as “argument”, “methodology”, “examples” etc etc. This then looks like an excel sheet.
There could be a bunch of text, or there might be only one sentence, or even a couple of words in the metadata field. But what I want to do is highlight one or two words that occur in different authors (notes) so I can make thematical connections with the research topic.
The notes area would not be suitable because I cannot see all the selected documents (eg, a document file for each piece of literature) at once - hence the need to see these in the outliner view.
The index card is a fine idea, but again, I would need to be able to highlight the text to visualise the connections.
That’s very helpful — gives me a fuller picture.
Off hand, it seems to me you are trying to make these particular metadata fields do double-duty — as specialized text fields for notes, and for some kind of categorizing by tag. Maybe if your dream came true that would do it for you (though it seems to me to have the downside that it is a strictly visual solution and not a database solution), unless and until that happens, you probably should tease these two functions apart. What about using keywords for the second function need? As you describe it, it sounds very much like exactly what keywording is for. And keywords can be shown in the outliner and have the virtue of being trackable/searchable/subselectable. Workable?
I never thought of the metadata in that way, so thanks for your input.
I can see how your suggestion would help, and probably I need to pare down to using the functions as they were meant. But was you say, my need is a visual solution, but that in itself is functional.
But from your suggestion, I don’t think keywording would help with the second issue. What I’m trying to achieve is synthesis among information, not further categorisation. The highlighting is to find connections that weren’t immediate when reading a single source/work.
For example, if I was researching/writing an article on the “social uses of vaccinations”, I would most likely have created keywords for the two terms “social use” and “vaccination” to help me narrow down my resources/reading notes having done my initial research/reading.
Once collected, the highlighting would be used to find more detailed connections between the sources. Eg, looking through all the metadata fields labelled “Author’s argument”, I might find a few that have “positive” and a few that have a “negative” view. Narrowing these sources down with adding “positive”/“negative” keywords is fine, but I probably wouldn’t initially look for the sources that only had either “negative” or “positive” views. If I find some similarities or differences with other terms or concepts when comparing the text in the metadata field, adding keywords to categorize the sources of these new discoveries would then have to be applied specifically for that resource, and an initial keyword search wouldn’t have returned many results, given that I might not have been looking for that particular concept in the first place to apply the keyword to the document/source.
So, I guess I can use a more refined version of keywords, but the point of highlighting in a synthesis matrix (which is what I’m using the outliner for - and it’s perfect in this sense) is to find deeper connections among the sources that I’ve been able to collect through keyword searches.
I just thought as the metadata text colour is changeable in the preferences then it wouldn’t hurt to be able to add formatting to it as well.