With apologies in advance for my soon to be evident lack of experience, I am trying to figure out the best way to use Scrivener to capture my notes in a project. Here’s the scenario:
Especially at the beginning of a project I write a bunch of stuff in fairly chaotic fashion in documents that I call “Journals”. At some point I go through those documents and highlight the parts that are interesting to me. At some later point, I go through the highlights and select the parts that I particularly like and compile them into a notes document. I might then take those notes and further sift them, putting them in character documents, or story, or place, etc.
It seems to me that there must be an elegant way to do this in Scrivener, but I can’t quite figure it out. First of all, highlighting at the moment is clunky because there’s no shortcut key. But then I realize, okay, I can use Inline Annotation which works the same way, has a shortcut key, and can be searched.
So now I’m at: how do I most efficiently compile all those annotations into a single document that I call “notes”. I’m assuming that if there is an easy way to do that, then I can repeat the process each time I need to further sift down. Suggestions?
Thanks in advance,
Shelley
PS okay, after doing some playing around, it looks like there probably isn’t a solution to this problem yet, but it might be in the developmental pipeline (exporting notes/footnotes to an rtf file). Unless I am wrong, my amended question is: is there a way to create a compile template that ONLY compiles footnotes?
Exporting annotations is already possible, so you should be able to do what you want. Use the inline annotations to mark the text you want to pull out, then choose File > Export > Export Annotations… You can choose to export annotations just from the selected documents in the binder or from the entire project. After you’ve exported, you can re-import the annotations RTF file and have all your notes back in a single document in Scrivener.
You can’t compile just annotations or just footnotes, no–they’re part of the text, so if you excluded the document text, you’d likewise end up excluding the notes. You could set the footnotes to compile as endnotes, thus grouping them all together and making them easier to copy, but since this was all just a workaround to the above anyway, it’s not worth bothering about.
This is brilliant, marvelous, fantastic and perfect. How did I miss it? I’m so excited!!!
Two questions and/or requests:
1)Before getting your reply, I had already converted all my notes to footnotes so that I could do your second, much clunkier workaround to force them to gather up, and I have come to love the way footnotes have a background color, which makes it like highlighting, and is easier for me to read. Would LOVE it if there were a way to set a background color for annotations, as well.
(This may be what is already in the pipeline, something I read on another thread) I would love it if there were a one-step version of this work-around. Meaning, a toggle in the “export” setting that would say, “export to new txt file in Scrivener project.” I imagine there must be at least one other person besides me who would appreciate it, and it doesn’t seem too far off the programming that has already been done.
Thanks as always and again and again for this amazing, flexible, creative program.
