In practice even though I’ve saved many marked up drafts, I can’t remember ever going back to one. I have, however, come across some that I didn’t mark with highlighter completely and then had to go back to compare with the working version. Hence I’d prefer the Pages model (even if my biographers a generation from now curse me for not leaving my drafts ).
Another advantage I see emerging with the Pages approach is the ease with which one can break from linear editing. When I work from paper or PDF I tend to start at the beginning, often leading to a situation where the first ten pages of a paper are absolutely perfect but the the later sections are neglected. I could start in the middle but I tend not to because I’d probably forget or skip some of the earlier annotations. Whereas in Pages I can start anywhere in the body knowing that the earlier annotations will be waiting when I start work on the beginning of the text.
All of which is to say that the software seems able to make up for some of the shortcomings of my existing workflow, in practice.
In practice, I delete those marked-up PDFs after a month or so–usually I make a Big Snapshot of Everything when I have a draft finished, or save off my project if I anticipate some serious restructuring (snapshots don’t help when you removed Scene A and wrote a completely new Scene B.) But I write fiction. I can see that on non-fiction works of many kinds (academic, legal, there may be further examples…) a complete “paper” trail might be desirable.
Yes, what you describe would be nice, but it’s not worth going to Pages to achieve it, for me. The PDF works for me because I seldom “print” a draft of a section longer than about 10K words, and I’m stubborn enough to work through it all. If the Scrivener Gods decree that written annotations are available, Woot! But I won’t hold my breath because, well, even if there’s some MacOS / iOS magic that would somehow make it efficient for Keith to code, how would the poor Windows people do? I can’t see this being easy to port cross-platform.
I’m sorry. I let my crankiness with end-users at work, who are not giving me enough information to implement a change to a program, bleed into my response to you. When discussions meander like they do here, it’s very hard to separate the original post’s points from the tangential responses that evolve from it. It’s on me to make it very clear that I’m addressing the original post so as to avoid that confusion.
Yes, exactly. I’m trying to tease out what they want from Scrivener that it can’t already do. What are the pain-points? What are the nice-to-haves that they can do without? etc…
Good point. If I ever needed to use annotations on iOS Scriv (I’m probably never going to mark up stuff on an iPhone, and I’m not yet convinced that an iPad would be a good value for me), I’d use inline annotations, and then convert them to inspector comments while working on my Mac. That would give me the best of both worlds, assuming I didn’t forget to convert back to inline before moving back to iOS. But I do love inspector comments because they’re always visible in the inspector pane for all the documents loaded to the editor. If they’re sparse, there’s no missing one that’s tens of thousands of words down from my current view.
So here’s the meat of my question: Don’t inline annotations, converted to inspector comments on the desktop, accomplish this already? Highly visible, easy to find annotations on a 300k-world novel would be hard to come by while working on iOS, even with inline annotations, for instance. But on the Mac side, after a conversion to inspector comments, you have near-instantaneous access to all of the annotated text in the entire work. If the goal is to edit on a real computer, and only mark up text as you go on iOS… what’s missing?
For those still working on their workflow (obviously not you), I’d suggest keeping PDF drafts in dropbox and using project bookmarks or import-as-alias, so that you can get to it on iOS using an external app, while being able to load it into a Scrivener editor pane/copyholder on a Mac.
Maybe it’s in part a question of character? The reason I wouldn’t want to do the annotating phase of the editing in Pages, or Scrivener if it had free form pencil annotating included, is that I would not be able to stop myself from suddenly starting to do changes to text instead of just reading and annotating.
For the same reason I always tell my students not to do the read-and-annotate phase of the editing on paper or in a software that doesn’t allow editing of the text while you read.
So for me pdf is the obvious choice, or even epub or mobi format. I’ve actually used both my Kindle reader and iBooks on the iPad for the read-and-annotate phase of the editing process. But Notes+, Notability or iAnnotate are better, because then I can use my pencil.
I’ve done this, but as you say, the problem is remembering to convert back to inline. Since I never know when I’m going to be using which system (in fact I like to change them up just to add variety) it’s a pain point for me.
Nothing except handwriting. at least from my perspective. But since I tend to go through, editing my drafts at about 10k, I’m finding recently that it’s actually easier to do this on my iPad completely, with the PDF in its orginal app, split screen. I suppose I could do it like that on the Mac if I can find a handwriting markup app that I like and I don’t have to buy a graphics tablet for.
But yeah, it’s that thing of being able to handwrite my edits separately from the actual editing of text that’s missing. And as Lunk pointed out, completely implementing handwritten annotations right inside Scrivener—what’s to keep distractible me from just starting the edits right then and there? I’ve found I accomplish more if I create the danged PDF and do my edits there than I do if I just start in on my text directly. And accomplishing more is what it’s about. So for me, I’m not sure that the handwriting annotation in Scrivener would add much of anything.
Yeah, I tried that sort of thing but it didn’t work for me. It actually requires me to organise my research. I’m not good at organisation; Evernote saves me from the need to organise my research at least.
Hi
You won’t be able to see the smart annotations in Scrivener - you’ll need do a round of edits in Pages, then copy the edited text back. It adds a bit of manual work but it’s worth it to me. By the time I get to this kind of editing, my organisational structure is usually set, so I can do a document at a time.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a way to hand annotate PDFs and write notes? Turn that writing into text? Sort of combining the functionality of Nebo/Notability/GoodNotes with Scrivener? That’s my dream.
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at least from my perspective. But since I tend to go through, editing my drafts at about 10k, I’m finding recently that it’s actually easier to do this on my iPad completely, with the PDF in its orginal app, split screen. I suppose I could do it like that on the Mac if I can find a handwriting markup app that I like and I don’t have to buy a graphics tablet for.
I’m not good at organisation; Evernote saves me from the need to organise my research at least.