Greetings,
I’ve only just started trying out Scrivener, so am not fully conversant with the programme.
Not sure if this is a bug or not.
After creating a “Scrivener link” in a document, the options for adding more “Scrivener Links” disappear, only an “UnlinK” option appears. “Saving” does not alter this scenario. One has to close the programme, and reopen it, to add another “Scrivener Link”.
This is on Win 7.
Thank you.
After reading the Help Manual, I shoud add that the above problem occurs if one one attempts to add a ‘Scrivener Link’ without selecting any text.
One has to click on two other documents prior to returning to the original document, before the ‘Scrivener Link’ option appears.
I haven’t had time to fully explore this issue , but there do seem to be inconsistencies not wholly attributable to my inexperience of Scrivener.
The programme is very good, and I look forward to its official release.
Hi,
It sounds like the problem is that you’re attempting to add as second link while the cursor is still placed in the first link. This isn’t too difficult to do at present because when you continue typing after adding a link, the new text picks up the link, so even if you add a link and hit the space key before attempting to add another link, you’re still in linked text. Lee’s found a workaround for this that will be in the next update, but in the meantime you will have to select that space or other text after the Scrivener link and choose “unlink” before you can add a new one. Might be easier to type past the link text first and then click back into the existing text and add a link; that way you can move back to the end and continue going without picking up the link. A little annoying, but like I said, this should be improved for the next update.
Let me know if that’s not really what’s going on, though. I haven’t been able to reproduce this otherwise, so if you’re experiencing something different, step by step instructions of how to see it myself would be quite helpful. Thanks!
Thank you for your reply, MimeticMouton.
Yes, that is it, exactly.
The problem is that I don’t really want to type any text. I just want a page of links, with a title.
The title being a concept, or topic, indexing a subcollection of notes from an Ur-Collection of about 160 notes. There are many topics, and some notes have multiple relevancies, so will be referenced by more than one topic.
I did try to do this through the ‘Collections’ feature, but had problems, and then felt that having more than fifty ‘collections’ would be unwieldy, crowding the left side of the user interface, and selection might prove difficult.
If there is an easier way, that would be great.
Have you tried using the document references for this? In the inspector, if you click the little books icon tab in the bottom (the second from the left) you’ll see a “references” section at the bottom, and by clicking the double arrows in the section header you can switch between Project References and Document References. Since you’re making different groups for this you’ll probably just want to use the Document References, and create the document with the topical title as you’re doing, but then you can just drag your Scrivener links (or any external links) into the references pane. Clicking the icon there will load the document in the editor (or the default external app, for other sorts of links), the same as links in the editor work. You can use the synopsis area or the document text area to write a summary of the topic, notes on the links, what have you. Since all your topic documents will appear in the binder, you can further group them there if you wish (or make larger collections for them, if that’s something that makes sense at that point).
Thank you, MimeticMouton (Jennifer).
Sounds good! Will try it.
As regards the linked text issue, I assumed that the ‘Unlink’ option meant that the previously created link would be ‘unlinked’ from its reference, the link text remaining as text.
If I can get this document (notes) and topoi management task completed, then it looks as though Scrivener will become part of my writing workflow. When I first looked at videos about Scrivener, of note was the general aptness of feature design, features are placed well.
Researching writing software has been a quest in itself, now the adventures of inscription are free to begin.
Sorry if I was unclear. Your assumption is correct; “unlink” will just remove the link, but the text will remain. You can select just part of the text, though, and unlink only that, so that you’d then be able to move on and add a new link after an unlinked blank space, for instance.
And just to reiterate, in the inspector you have both Document Notes and Document References available, as separate things. The default view will show you the notes, but by clicking the tabs in the inspector footer you can switch to references:
The top section of the inspector will remain the same, showing the synopsis and general meta-data, but with the references showing you’ll be able to just drag in documents from the binder and drop them in the list and have Scrivener do the rest of the work for you. You’ll probably want to lock the editor (Ctrl-Alt-L) before you begin dragging, since at the moment as soon as you select an item in the binder the editor will switch to view that document–this will change, so that dragging and dropping is easier, but meanwhile just locking the editor will prevent the switch and allow you to easily drag your links to the references.
Many thanks, MimeticMouton (Jennifer)!
Your replies are helpful, and promote understanding.