Scivener and collaboration

Scrivener
1

I’m a writer, and Scrivener fanatic. Of late I’ve started collaborating with another author. I write in Scrivener, copy and paste to google docs. Clunky, but workable.

Doing a little research I encountered this cultofmac.com/291161/draft- … e-writing/

Problems with draft and dropbox but it got me thinking about the Sync External Folder feature. Obviously I work in Scrivener a lot. Leave it running on my computer pretty much all the time. I also use Dropbox. Been using both for many years.

SO. . . the question revolves around external folder sync. Is it possible (has anyone tried it or had issues with) creating a project, doing an external folder sync. Creating a copy of that project so it goes to the external folder sync location and then author #1 users project #1, author (or editor) #2 uses project #2 and they are bothing doing external sync to the same folder?

Because dropbox might be in a different location for each author a system variable could be set %dropbox% is D:\Dropbox for instance so the sync folder would be %dropbox%\projectsync ?

In summary. Is there a reason this would not work using dropbox;

  1. Create a project.
  2. Create an external Sync folder
  3. Copy project
  4. Author #1 uses Project #1 and syncs to folder
  5. Editor uses Project #2 to make changes and syncs to folder

The editor would not be creating new documents, just editing existing.

Thoughts? Has your brain turned to mush with too much?

2

This is a Bad Idea. From the Mac v. 3.1.3 manual, p. 365:

Two copies of the same project count as two different projects.

Hope this helps.

3

A better solution for this particular use case would be the Import and Merge function. See Section 5.3.2 in the Scrivener 3 manual for more information.

Essentially, author #1 would own the “master” copy of the project, and would merge author #2’s changes back to the main project at regular intervals.

Katherine