Hi - I have years of handwritten journals that I have begun scanning and uploading to a Scrivener Project to preserve and possibly someday compile as a legacy book. It took awhile to figure out how to upload the pages into Scrivener but once I did I’m liking how I can organize them… But, now that I have several loaded into the draft portion of the project I’m sometimes getting the orange ball spinning on my Mac at opening and quitting.
Before continuing to add any more to this project I wanted to check if there is any advice for not bogging down the app or whether Scrivener may not be the best place to scan these pages to.
Thank you for any help. Chris
Scrivener is optimized for handling text. For hundreds (thousands?) of handwritten journal page images, you might be happier with a tool that’s optimized for handling images.
If your ultimate goal is text output, you might look into options for extracting text from those images. Once you’ve done that, Scrivener would be happy to handle the text for you.
Better to scan to PDF. You could sort the pages in a PDF app if you need to. Scrivener can import images or PDFs as reference, but it is not designed for the purpose you have in mind.
Side note: Many apps now can interpret handwriting and output text. So you might be able to OCR the PDF so that it becomes searchable.
I also have years of handwritten notebooks. I had always planned to type them down on the computer so that I could search them etc. But I waited, oh so wisely, until my eyesight got worse and switching between the notebook on the desk and the computer screen became quite eyestraining.
So I scanned them and have the scans side by side with the transcript in Scrivener’s split screen editor, which is great. It takes a lot of time to digitize my notes though, and I am hoping that soon OCR will produce good results even from my scrawlings.
But to the technical side of things: No problem with spinning beach balls at all. First I scanned them to PDF. Even in colour because from a certain point on I have written with pencils and not with felt pens in rich black. And grey on slightly tinted paper does not provide good contrast, even less so in a grey scale image.
I did not scan in one go because I could not use the sheet feeder without destroying the notebooks, and opening the lid of the scanner, getting the notebook, turning a page, closing the lid again etc. is quite tiresome. But merging PDFs works without hassle (and without extra software) on macOS.
The notebooks have about 150 pages, so the PDFs contain of approximately 75 pages. Nothing Scrivener can’t handle. And of course the position in the PDF is preserved when the project is closed.
And one day… I will have all my handwritten notes in consecutive order in their projects (maybe one notebook per project, I have not decided yet) and I will also have them as atomic notes in DEVONthink. As proof that I was never the young genius I suspected me to be, but just young.
also consider importing File > Import >Files as Research shortcuts this will allow you to access the image as though in Scrivener without bogging the project down.
Thank you both for responding and giving me great feedback. Suavito that’s a huge project typing all your journals. Goaliedad I’ll try moving what I have already scanned in the Research section and see if that stops the spinning ball. Maybe the colors and handwriting are what is bogging it down. Great suggestion.
You have to use the File > Import function to import the pdf’s (as shortcuts) so they do not add to the size of the project in a substantial fashion. Moving to the research section alone may not be enough.
I find that having pages of links in Scrivener to research documents in a dedicated folder per project on my hard drive easier to manage. For one, PDFs as shortcuts in Scrivener scroll horribly slow.
Managing the links through Bookmarks works as expected and access to external content is instantaneous/same as clicking on a shortcut.
The beauty of Scrivener is you can create multiple ways to find what works best. I often create link files with a list of information links. For example, if I had 6 or 7 locations for my story each with research, I might create one file with a list of all the locations with the bookmarks to the information for each site. So one document would have all the location information in one spot. Putting this link page in Project bookmarks makes this information available from any document in the project. I did this for my characters as well, though those files were inside the project.