Sharing Projects with Non-Scrivener Users

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1

A Scrivener project, roughly speaking, consists of three parts:

–document
–non-printable references (these can be both printed and not printed, such as media files)
–settings

If you want to share a project with a Scrivener user, it’s simple enough to send a project file (putting aside for the moment any incompatibilities caused by differing versions).

But what do you do when you want to share a project with a non-Scrivener user? You can compile the document and send the references as a separate zip file. Are there any other solutions besides creating a giant pdf?

I’m not sure that there’s a right answer. It’s a lot to ask a collaborator to learn Scrivener, especially the non-computer savvy.

I remember mailing a floppy disk to a group of recipients; half said, “great idea” while the other half complained, “what is this?” I thought of making wiki. This has the advantage of being plain html–more or less–but there are security issues.

Suggestions welcome.

2

I’m sure there will be a number of suggestions arriving from experts, but to help understand your needs, exactly what is it you want your collaborators to do with what you send them? And do you know what it is that they prefer you send them, e.g. PDFs, Word documents, Scrivener project files they can edit/mark-up, paper, etc.

3

I would expect they would add to the information corrected, read it, and contribute to the document to be compiled.

4

You could use the Sync with External Folder function to allow them to directly edit the component documents.

What I’ve done in this sort of situation is simply Compile the draft and let them use the Word Track Changes tools. More familiar to them, and I don’t need to worry about them messing with my carefully assembled structure. A bit more work for me, but I can consider that in my quote. (This was a freelance writing project.)

5

Not a bad idea, but I’d like for them to have access to the source or reference media files as well.

6

Reference files you can load to whatever sharing service is convenient for everyone. I assume those are static files that they don’t need to edit?

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7

Correct. But then you’re uploading say, 25+ files which requires some finesse uploading and downloading as well. I’ve seen some convert all these files to pdf before concatenating them, but it’s unwieldy.

8

I don’t know what your source materials are, so I don’t know what to suggest. But I do think you’ll probably be happier treating the materials to be edited separately from the static materials.

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9

Scrivener can’t add media files such as images and pdf’s to a compiled document. These do not need to be edited.

10

For the reference/media materials part, two options seem the odds on candidates.

  1. Zip up a folder of the requisite ref/media materials and send the zip file to each in your group. Has the virtue of not requiring tech sophistication in others.

  2. Toss copies of all the reference material into something like a dropbox subfolder, then dropbox-share that folder with your group. (Assuming it doesn’t contain military secrets, haha.) If your group have and can deal with dropbox or equiv, then you should be good.

Either way has the important feature that it maintains the reference materials in a random access form — generally better for misc ref materials than lashing it all together into one mashedup pdf.

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