So, I realize it is now over ten years later, but I thought I’d chip in because this is a significant problem I’m seeking a solution to as well, and I think anyone doing research could resonate with it.
I’m writing chapters for my Ph.D., and it’s extremely common to have 40–100 pages of pasted source excerpts from my Devonthink database split up between separate subtopic-labeled notes within a research folder in Scrivener. As I import sections of each quote from this research folder, or paraphrase them into my writing document, it becomes incredibly difficult to jump back and find the precise quotation in the research folder. I literally have to go back and start doing searches which wastes a lot of time, especially if the phrase occurs more than once in my research folder.
What would be even more unwieldy and unfeasible would be to create a separate note for each one of the hundreds and hundreds of quotations (as has sometimes been suggested to enable direct-linking to individual sources). So I’ve resolved to collect them into notes by subtopic where each sub-topic could have 5–75 quotation excerpts.
Because I find myself needing to jump back to individual quotations all the time in the writing process… Is there any new way to accomplish this direct linking to a phrase within a note in the ten years since this problem was first raised?
Devonthink recently introduced a capability to copy citations with a source link. These source links are quite nifty because they do jump to the precise point of text within the file that it was copied from and visually highlights it temporarily in the case of PDFs. RTF/DOCX/TXT return the starting line, which is close enough. I mention this because it is a proof of concept for something that could potentially work/be developed in Scrivener if there isn’t already a way to do this.
Based on Devonthink’s direct link link structure, it appears that data is returned based on two variables after the file reference identifier:
- The position of the result based on the page number and the count of characters into the page.
- An immediately performed phrase search that jumps to the result if needed.
There seems to be a hierarchy happening between these two variables as #1 seems to occur no matter what if #2 fails or isn’t performed.
In any event, I just mention that as a proof of concept that this can be done. What I’m most interested in is what Scrivener might already offer to solve this problem after ten years. Please advise.