Short version: I’d like to be able to snapshot/save what order documents were in to aid in revisions.
I am heavily revising my novel, and that means not just rewriting scenes, but rearranging. I just finished one section and decided I should reread the rest of the novel before continuing. But uh-oh! I already reordered scenes and added notes/summaries for what the change would be. Some are net-new, so they will just be blank, but others are times I decided a discovery should be made earlier, and thus kept the old version in that document’s snapshots and moved the whole thing. I can probably puzzle out what my old order was, but it would be really helpful to see that history, so I can have a more complete snapshot of the book between first and second revisions, but be able to see the progress without hopping between complete backups. I also plan to mark up the documents as I do this (novel sub part at a time, I am basically working beginning-middle-end separately.), so reviewing in a backup file would be a pain.
In the process of looking for something like this, I found the snapshot selected documents option. That’s super awesome and really helpful for my process. Snapshots are what brought me to Scrivener.
In the Mac version, the best way to do this would be to create a temporary “table of contents” file listing the order you want to preserve.Since that function probably exists in the beta as well, I’m moving this from the Wish List to the beta forum.
Okay. Found it in the manual; it’s not in the tutorial (but, then, why would it be?).
Select all the items in the binder you want to include. (the manual says to use the outline view, but in Windows, the binder works)
Do Edit → copy Special → copy documents as structured linked list.
Create a new document. Click in it. Paste. As far as “temporary,” I don’t know. But this would work, yes? I don’t know if there’s anything strange about copying from the binder.
And if you want it to NOT be linked to the documents or chapters you chose, select all, right-click, and select unlink.
You can also create a collection of all the documents, in order, before rearranging them. The collection won’t include new documents created after that point, but it will preserve the order.