We’ve transitioned to tablets at my publishing house. Today, one of my editors told me about a “set mark” feature she uses in iAnnotate. It’s a temporary mark she can set in the text before she goes hunting down something else in a manuscript, even that chapter. When she’s finished (maybe even after some editing), she can then return to her “set mark” with a tap of a finger.
I looked through the help section for a similar feature in Scrivener, but didn’t find one (not that that means there isn’t one there; I just didn’t find it).
There isn’t something precisely like that, mainly because Scrivener works in many multiple documents rather than one very long PDF. So we not only need a way to return to a spot in the text, but potentially a way to return to prior documents entirely.
For the latter, you have a history feature built into each split that works basically just like your web browser. Hit the back button in the header bar up by the title of the document, and you go back to the prior thing you clicked on. Right-click to jump several documents backward or forward. You may find, in doing that, that Scrivener automatically “marks” where you were in that document by the cursor position, even remembering any text that was selected. Thus you can double-click on a word, go on to something else, and when you come back to that document that word will be right in front of you, still selected. Cmd-[ and Cmd-] also triggers those buttons, just like in a browser.
Now within a single document itself, there are a few ways you can navigate around in your text, which to use will be up to taste:
Split views. If you’ve heard about them, you’ve probably heard about how they are useful to view entirely different documents, but when you make one you’ll notice the default is to just split the current document into two windows. Now you can scroll around and reference or edit other areas of your document while keeping your return location static in the other split. When you’re done, just click the split button for the “static” side.
Comments: For quick jaunts, it might be easier to just put a tag down on some text. For something like this you could just leave it with the default name and date text. When you’re ready to return to it, click on the comment in the Inspector sidebar and then hit the delete button to remove it. You can also use inline annotations for this kind of thing, if you prefer using a little typed in text marker that you can later search for to return to and remove.
Bookmarks Annotations: Shift-Cmd-B will add a little “bookmark” to the current paragraph. Click on the icon in the editor header bar and use the Bookmarks sub-menu to return to it. I don’t recommend depending too heavily upon this feature as it may be removed. Comments have kind of replaced the functionality this feature provides.
Jump to Selection: this is actually a standard Mac feature, and nothing fancy at all, but quite effective it all you are doing is reading. The premise is that scrolling and PgUp/Down does not move the cursor. Cmd-J scrolls the view back to the cursor without typing anything.
There may be other tricks as well! Scrivener is designed around the premise of giving you generic tools and letting you combine them in useful ways. And let me know if you can’t find something I mentioned above.
Sorry for bringing this old chestnut up again.
I have for years been a heavy user of Scrivener, but haven’t so far been using Bookmarks.
According to section 15.8 Shift-Cmd-B will put a bookmark with an asterisk in the beginning of the paragraph, and so far i all works fine. You can also, according to the manual make a bookmark by placing any inline annotation on a line by itself.
To navigate to these bookmarks I’m supposed to go to the header bar icon menu, and find my bookmarks under Bookmarks.
Here my problems start.
a) The text (Shift-Cmd-B) bookmarks does not show up on the list.
b) Only some of the inline annotations show up.
(I do think that I’ve found the culprit causing problem b. It seems as an notation shows up in the list only if it’s limited to one paragraph. If like me you sometimes convert a few paragraphs that are candidates for rewrite or deletion to annotations to make them stand out, these will not show up. Suppose I could live with that.)
There may be some interference going on with your formatting, I’m not sure. I haven’t tested it too deeply here, but if I create a blank project and type in “test phrase” then hit Shift-Cmd-B, I see “test phrase” in the bookmarks menu.
Works for me too. But only if I just do the Shift-Cmd-B thing.
According to the manual: “Bookmarks are simply an inline annotation starting with an asterisk and a space. The first few words of the line following will be used to label the bookmark in the navigation menu. If you wish to provide a custom label, add it to the annotation after the asterisk and the rest of the line will be ignored.”
If I add text after the asterisk (which I had done in my project) the bookmark disappears from the bookmarks menu.
(Further testing shows, that it actually is possible to customise the bookmark, as long as I do not write the text immediately after the asterisk. I have to preserve the space between asterisk and text.)
As this type of bookmarks apparently will disappear in coming versions, I suppose I’d better get used to using comments instead. Two things I don’t like about that, is that I have to have inspector open to comments (when I have it open I usually want to se other things like document notes and keywords). My second gripe is that the comments — as opposed to bookmarks — are sorted in the chronological order they are made, not in the order they occur in the text. Is there a way to get around that?
Yes, the space after the asterisk(s) is a necessary ingredient.
Fair enough, though I think it balances out by not being in a single-use buried menu, too. If you just need a one-off jump the menu is fine, but if you want to step through something, having a persistent panel is better.
I don’t even know how you got it to display that way in the first place. Comments and Footnotes have always been listed in the order they are anchored to the original text, and there should be no way to every change that.
Now, unabashed, I’m at it again. Yes on the Mac the comments come in the right order and help me to navigate to the document and exact place they are pointing at. Admittedly a useful navigation tool when I have a number of documents open as a scrivening. But is there any way for me to use the comments to navigate between documents on my iPad. In iOS, as far as I understand I have to scan document by document to find the position of a comment, and double click on it to see the content — not the other way around … I mean, there isn’t anywhere I can see a list of comments.
That’s correct, there is no summary or comments mode that displays these objects in a navigable list like on the Mac. You can jump from point to point, within a document, with the arrow buttons in the lower right of the “post-it” while viewing a comment, that’s about the extent of it.
Comments and Footnotes have always been listed in the order they are anchored to the original text, and there 
My mistake. I apparently don’t keep tab of all the flash backs and flash forwards I’ve made in my draft …