Hi 
I use the comments feature a lot. I mean the ones created with CMD+SHIFT+* or the Format–>Comment command …or that cute toolbar “comment” icon.
I noticed that when I take a new snapshot, the older snapshot’s comments disappear. The old-style balloon annotations are preserved, though. So that when I open an old snapshot, I can see the balloon annotations, but I don’t get the “old set” of comments with it. Is it supposed to be this way?
I hope it’s not another case of me missing my reading glasses. 
I tested a few documents to make sure I can’t see an old snapshot’s old set of comments. 
The darn things disappear only after I take a new snapshot.
Hi,
No, comments and footnotes of all sorts should be maintained. You won’t be able to open them unless you drag out the snapshot to the inspector or roll back to the snapshot, but they should be preserved:
All the best,
Keith
Meaning the editor. Just drag it to the header bar and then you can view the snapshot in the regular editor and see your comments in the inspector pane like you’d normally view your comments. Opt+drag if you want to do a compare view.
Thanks Keith
Just to make sure we got each other right I’ll post pics of what I mean.
Here’s my beautiful masterpiece, “blah”.
I took snapshot 1 before adding comments. The snapshot is highlighted in the inspector:
I added a balloon comment and yellow [CMD+SHIFT+*] comments, and took snapshot 2 – the one highlighted in the inspector. All the comments are indeed present when I look at the inspector window:
My masterpiece wasn’t quite there yet, so I wrote some more and took snapshot 3.
Now when I highlight snapshot 2 in the inspector, I can only see the balloon comment. The yellow ones are gone:
To make sure, I dragged snapshot 2 into the editor’s header bar. Again, I can’t see the yellow comments anymore, and the inspector shows “No Comments”:
The third and latest snapshot’s comments are perfectly fine though:
See? It’s as though with older snapshots, the yellow comments are lost as soon as you take a new snapshot.
So What am I doing wrong? Can I see old comments sets only if I do a rollback? 
Darn. It’s past midnight here! Gonna get me some more coffee and do some writing. Outside of “blah”. 
Ohhhhh. I see. Dang. They seem to really be lost when that happens; rollback doesn’t restore them, no. This wipes out inspector footnotes, also.
Yeah, I have confirmed this. It seems to be the tipping point is at the third snapshot.
- Document with notes and footnotes (all inspector)
- Snapshot
- Edit notes and footnotes; add a footnote
At this point, I can view the old snapshot and the original notes are intact. They show up in the inspector when I drag the snapshot to the header bar. No problems. I have two snapshots at this point, because I decided to roll back to the original to make sure they restore correctly, and when doing so, let Scrivener snapshot the #3 state.
At this point everything is still fine.
- Create a new snapshot
- Edit some more notes; delete a comment
Now the original two snapshots are dead. No linked comments or footnotes in them at all, either in the Inspector or when dragged the header bar.
Until this is fixed: Recommend converting inspector notes and footnotes to inline notes prior to snapshotting. These are safe from this bug as they are formatting, not links. You can convert them back after you snapshot, if that is how you prefer to roll. Just always remember to embed them into the document as inlines whenever snapshotting.
Relevant conversion commands are in Format/Convert/ sub-menu.
I get it directly on the second snapshot and without need to edit either the comments/footnotes or the body text.
- Document with inspector comments and footnotes.
- Snapshot
- Snapshot
The first snapshot has lost the comments and footnotes.
It must the way I made the second snapshot. I didn’t make it specifically, but had Scrivener create it when I rolled back to the first snapshot. At that point I had two documents in the snapshot viewer with valid notes in accordance with their particular state at the time of the snapshot.
Hmm. I tried to replicate that but it still lost the comments:
- New document with text, inspector comment and footnote
- Snapshot
- Roll back to snapshot and have Scrivener take a new snapshot.
At this point, the comments/footnotes still appear in the original snapshot.
- Click the new snapshot.
- Click the original snapshot.
The original snapshot has lost comments and footnotes. They’re present at the time of rolling back, so my rolled-back document has them, but the equivalent snapshot no longer contains them. This happens whether I edit the document and notes between the snapshot and the rollback or not.
In place of steps 4 and 5, you can also do this:
- Open a different document in the editor
- Return to the original document.
The first snapshot is missing the comments, etc.
You know, I might not have gone back and checked as thoroughly as a I thought, because now that’s what I’m seeing as well. I could have sworn I saw comments and footnotes in both the first and second snapshot and dragged them both out to test them, but on second attempt the first snapshot loses its notes as you describe.
From what I can tell, the problem boils down to the fact that the index.xml file only stores the element for the last item in the XML tree. Here is an example after three snapshots:
[code]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Untitled Snapshot
2010-11-22 20:02:52 -0800
Untitled Snapshot
2010-11-22 20:03:47 -0800
Untitled Snapshot
2010-11-22 20:04:30 -0800
0,5
0.992 0.929 0.525
<![CDATA[{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf320
{\fonttbl\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Verdana;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\pard\tx560\tx1120\tx1680\tx2240\tx2800\tx3360\tx3920\tx4480\tx5040\tx5600\tx6160\tx6720\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
\f0\fs20 \cf0 A note}]]>
10,5
0.85 0.85 0.85
<![CDATA[{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf320
{\fonttbl\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Verdana;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\pard\tx560\tx1120\tx1680\tx2240\tx2800\tx3360\tx3920\tx4480\tx5040\tx5600\tx6160\tx6720\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
\f0\fs20 \cf0 A footnote}]]>
16,4
0.992 0.929 0.525
<![CDATA[{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf320
{\fonttbl\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Verdana;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\pard\tx560\tx1120\tx1680\tx2240\tx2800\tx3360\tx3920\tx4480\tx5040\tx5600\tx6160\tx6720\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
\f0\fs20 \cf0 Another note}]]>
[/code]
The first two snapshots have lost their tree. Hopefully that will make it an easy fix, since the structure is there to accommodate these notes—it just isn’t being fully used.
Eek, this was a nasty one, sorry for missing the factors involved! I’ve just fixed this for 2.0.1. The trouble was that when saving new snapshots with the snapshot pane open in the inspector, when re-saving the older snapshots it was looking for the link element to save the comments and footnotes, but the link element only gets applied in Scrivener’s editor and so wasn’t present for stored snapshots, so it was completely missing the comments and footnotes in older snapshot text.
As I say, this is fixed for 2.0.1, which will be with everyone shortly.
Thanks and all the best,
Keith
So a “nasty one” was fixed in a matter of hours?
Maybe you should write a full styles implementation and a real RTF engine for OSX and sell the library back to Apple to fix all their busted axx software. They haven’t managed to get it right in what, 10 years?