Split panes, Labels and Snapshots

[oliviaweb]

Hi everyone,

I am sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, I looked but I didn’t find!
Here is my first question:

• is there a way to switch the content of the panes in split-pane view?
  Each time I click on the split-pane button it seems to send my active document on the “wrong” side, meaning the right side of the vertical split intead of the left, where I’d like to have it. I’m sure there must be an easy way to solve this, but I haven’t found it!

Other questions would be:

• Even though I have “Tint Rows/Cards with Label color” enabled, the rows or cards are not tinted in the Outliner or Cork Board views. I can still see the colors of my documents in small, though, when I display the File Type symbols or the Labels, so that helps me work around the problem, but still it shouldn’t be that way, should it?

• Last : I am having trouble with the Snapshot function:
  I tried several times these past days selecting a few documents inside a folder in the Draft and choosing Take Snapshot of Selected Documents. I would hear each time a photo sound but invariably there would be no Snapshot in the Snapshot window except an empty one dated to a few days before (I even tried deleting all existing Snapshots so as to be sure that the new one created had in fact, really an odd date and time and wasn’t a remnant of past endeavours, which was the case: it created an entry dating 5 days back)…
  Also, in order to be able to view the Snapshot window, once I had taken the Selected Documents Snapshot, also required a lot of random selecting and deselecting of windows, panes and documents until the menu entry “Show Snapshots” would become available again (not greyed out).
  A bug? Or my computer not fully compatible? (Mac OS 10.6.3)

Is there supposed to be a way to take a Snapshot of only the contents of the Draft Folder for example (and not of the whole project) or any other selection of documents, that I didn’t get?

Thank you in advance.
(I am, by the way, an enthusiastic user)

[AmberV]

@oliviaweb

is there a way to switch the content of the panes in split-pane view?

Yes, this is already implemented, use View/Layout/Swap Documents. You may also use the View/Binder Affects... menu to control where documents open a bit better. This may or may not solve your issue with how things open up. But you are right the application kind of presumes that you’ll want the primary document on the right or bottom. If you think of it in terms of how many e-mail and other 3-pane applications work, it makes more sense.

Even though I have “Tint Rows/Cards with Label color” enabled, the rows or cards are not tinted in the Outliner or Cork Board views. I can still see the colors of my documents in small, though, when I display the File Type symbols or the Labels, so that helps me work around the problem, but still it shouldn’t be that way, should it?

In Scrivener’s Font and Color preferences, check the opacity slider for tinting. You might have it turned down so low that it is not making a visible difference. This definitely does work (unless you are seeing some kind of bug), I use it all of the time. Another thing to check, if the opacity slider is high enough, is how vivid the label colours are. If they are too soft they might just be hard to see.

If none of that works, you might have your system contrast settings too high. Another user ran into this a while back. Mac OS X has a system-level contrast setting which is designed to increase clarity for those who need vision enhancement. The way it accomplishes this tends to blow out subtle colour difference rather quickly.

Is there supposed to be a way to take a Snapshot of only the contents of the Draft Folder for example (and not of the whole project) or any other selection of documents, that I didn’t get?

I’m not sure what is happening here, it is a little difficult to visualise what you are describing. I would suggest trying the following:

Select a single item in the Binder and press Cmd-5 to snapshot it. Does the icon acquire a little dog-ear on the upper-right? If so then it should be snapshotted. Exit Scrivener, restart it and see if you still have a snapshot and use the snapshot viewer to verify there is content. When viewing snapshots, make sure you only have one item selected at a time. While you can snapshot many documents at once, the viewer only works on a single selection. This might be the source of you needing to “randomly” click around. It could be that after a degree of clicking, you finally get to the point where you are selecting only a single Binder item.

[oliviaweb]

Hi AmberV,

THANK YOU for such a speedy and helpful response!

Yes, this is already implemented, use View/Layout/Swap Documents. You may also use the View/Binder Affects... menu to control where documents open a bit better.

→ this is definitely what I was looking for! I am sorry I didn’t find by myself. That’s wonderful, thank you. Binder Affects is also very useful.

In Scrivener’s Font and Color preferences, check the opacity slider for tinting. You might have it turned down so low that it is not making a visible difference.

→ That was the problem! It’s solved…

Select a single item in the Binder and press Cmd-5 to snapshot it. Does the icon acquire a little dog-ear on the upper-right? If so then it should be snapshotted. Exit Scrivener, restart it and see if you still have a snapshot and use the snapshot viewer to verify there is content. When viewing snapshots, make sure you only have one item selected at a time. While you can snapshot many documents at once, the viewer only works on a single selection. This might be the source of you needing to “randomly” click around. It could be that after a degree of clicking, you finally get to the point where you are selecting only a single Binder item.

→ There I tried what you wrote above and had the following results.

1- selecting just one document and snapshotting it worked, or so I first thought: it did create a new entry in the Snapshots window that had the right date and time and the right content, it seemed, BUT: strangely it had restored all the previous entries I had deleted earlier in the day (with the Delete button), you know, the “empty” ones with the wrong date and time. And when I clicked on those they seemed to have THE SAME CONTENT as my very last Snapshot!! So I RE-deleted those with the wrong date and time and left only the newest one made following your directions.

2- I restarted Scrivener and opened the Snapshots window. All good.

3- I closed the Snapshots window, clicked on one single document in the Binder, as you had suggested (another one than the one I had just snapshotted), and re-opened the Snapshots window, just to check it again.
This time it had a list of 4 or 5 wrong dated Snapshots only, all of them displaying the document I had just selected in the Binder (but not done anything with)… The Snapshot I had created before (I had even given it a title to recognize it easily) was gone…

4- Closing the Snapshots window and reopening it several times with each time a different document selected in the Binder showed me that these “freak” Snapshots would all only ever display the content of the currently selected document…

That’s all I could find out.
I have found and implemented workarounds to this so there is no urgency for me to find a solution, however. But it does sound weird, doesn’t it?

Many thanks, in any case, for your swift action. The solutions to the other problems are very helpful and already in use!
Best,
Mathilde

[AmberV]

Something definitely does sound weird with your project structure, as that is not how snapshots are supposed to work. You might wish to proceed on this by sending a copy of your project to support (feel free to remove any confidential data, but make sure you can replicate the issue after doing so).

One thing you could try on your own:

Create a duplicate copy of your project. This is best done by using the backup option (without zip archive) from the File menu. Now open the duplicated Scrivener Project in finder by right-clicking and selecting Show Package Contents. You should see a snapshots folder inside this. Select all of the files in there and delete them. Now open up this duplicated project in Scrivener and see if you get the same issues. This doesn’t solve the problem if you have important information in those snapshots obviously, but if you don’t and it fixes the problem, it is perfectly safe to manually delete snapshots this way.

[KB]

One thing to note is that you have to click “OK” at the bottom of the Snapshots window for any changes you make in the window to take effect. So, if you deleted some snapshots but didn’t click “OK”, then the next time you view the snapshots for that document they will be back, as you didn’t confirm it (this behaviour has been changed for 2.0 - in fact, I’ve built the snapshots panel into the inspector, which is much more intuitive, for 2.0).

It’s a little difficult to know what is going on with the rest of the snapshots issues, though. Can you reproduce it? That is, can you try making some snapshots again and pay close attention to the sequence, and see if you can end up with the wrong snapshots in the wrong places again, so that I can see the problem for myself?

Thanks to AmberV for getting back to you and helping you with the other issues!

All the best,
Keith

[oliviaweb]

Ok, AmberV, thank you again, I will definitely try this out.

Keith, thank you for getting back to me as well, and compliments for such GREAT software!
Yes, I did click “OK” at the bottom of the Snapshots window each time and I could replicate the behaviour as well. I tried doing just that and wrote down what happened in my last post, although maybe not accurately enough for thorough debugging work.
So here another go at it:

1- I select one (random) document in the Binder (in a subfolder in Draft) and go to the Show Snapshots menu. It is greyed out. (I have two editor panes open currently, on the left my whole Draft outlined - locked in place -, on the right an active text document from the Research folder)

2- I select another document in the Binder: Show Snapshots is still greyed out.

3- I de-select the Lock in Place function in the left editor and click on yet another document in the Binder and go to Show Snapshots. It’s available.

4- I select it. There I see this:

5- If I click on ANY of those files, I see the SAME document in the Binder I had selected before going to the Snapshots window.

6- I delete all of these entries with the Delete Button and close the Snapshots window with the OK button. (So it should be empty, now, no more Snapshots, logically)

7- I quit Scrivener.

8- I re-open Scrivener (clicking on its symbol in the Dock)

9- Everything looks the same as when I just left: two editor panes, the same document in the Binder selected. I go to Show Snapshots, it’s greyed out. I click clearly on the said document in the Binder and go again to Show Snapshots: it’s still greyed out.

10- I click on another document (at random, but in the same folder) and go to Show Snapshots. It’s available. I select it.

11- This is what I see:

12- As I click on either of these entries I only see the content of my just-now-randomly-selected-document in the Binder.

13- I delete again all the entries, the same way I did it before (Delete button) close the Snapshots window (with OK).

14- I try to reopen it right away. It’s greyed out.

15- I click on another document in Binder and go to Show Snapshots. I can open it.

16- This is what I see…
Needless to say, that all these entries show is the content of the last document I selected before going to Show Snapshots…

etc…

Now I’ll try AmberV’s suggestion and get back to you as soon as I can (I have to leave for a little while)

Best,
M

[KB]

Hi Olivia,

Nothing in what you describe sounds wrong to me - from your description, everything seems to be working as it should be, so maybe I am misunderstanding you. Further explanation inline below.

@oliviaweb

1- I select one (random) document in the Binder (in a subfolder in Draft) and go to the Show Snapshots menu. It is greyed out. (I have two editor panes open currently, on the left my whole Draft outlined - locked in place -, on the right an active text document from the Research folder)

2- I select another document in the Binder: Show Snapshots is still greyed out.

“Show Snapshots” will be greyed out for any documents that don’t have any snapshots associated with them. You said previously that you selected some documents in the binder and used Take Snapshots of Selected Documents. Those documents should have snapshots associated with them; other documents won’t. You can tell which documents have had snapshots taken because the corner of the icon will be curled in the binder. If the corner of the icon isn’t curled, then “Show Snapshots” won’t be available.

3- I de-select the Lock in Place function in the left editor and click on yet another document in the Binder and go to Show Snapshots. It’s available.

Presumably this one has had one or more snapshots taken of it.

4- I select it. There I see this:[attachment=2]Bildschirmfoto 2010-04-13 um 20.41.16.png

5- If I click on ANY of those files, I see the SAME document in the Binder I had selected before going to the Snapshots window.

Yes… What were you expecting? If you click on one of those rows in the snapshots window, the text of the snapshot will appear in the snapshot window. It won’t affect anything in the main window (unless you click on “Roll Back” to restore the text to the version selected in the snapshots window). (Also note that the snapshots window doesn’t auto-update to show snapshots for the current document unless you go to Show Snapshots again.)

6- I delete all of these entries with the Delete Button and close the Snapshots window with the OK button. (So it should be empty, now, no more Snapshots, logically)

Yes… For that document. But you don’t mention re-opening it again for that document. If you click on another document that has snapshots associated with it, then obviously the snapshots window will be populated with snapshots for the other document.

…

10- I click on another document (at random, but in the same folder) and go to Show Snapshots. It’s available. I select it.

But this is a random document, not the one you clicked on before. The one you clicked on before should no longer have any snapshots associated with it as you deleted them. But this new random document does have snapshots associated with it, which are reflected in the snapshots window.

…

12- As I click on either of these entries I only see the content of my just-now-randomly-selected-document in the Binder.

Exactly as it should be… Only the text in the snapshots window will change. And if each of the snapshots was made of the document in the same state (so that it hadn’t been changed between snapshots), then clicking on each snapshot wouldn’t appear to do anything anyway.

So, from what I can gather, I think you have misunderstood the Snapshots feature. Have you read the Help file section on snapshots? Or, try checking out our tutorial video dedicated to the snapshots feature:

literatureandlatte.com/videos

That should clear things up. From what you are saying, you expect the snapshots window to show project-wide snapshots, whereas snapshots work on a per-document basis (this is exactly why I’ve moved it into the inspector for 2.0, which makes this a lot more obvious). That is, any single document may have multiple snapshots associated with it (all taken of that single document at different stages of editing or composition), or no snapshots. If the selected document in the binder has no snapshots associated with it, then “Show Snapshots” will be greyed out in the menu as there is nothing to show. If you delete all the snapshots for a single document, that has no effect on snapshots taken for other documents.

I hope that clears things up - but please do take a look at the tutorial video and/or the Help file section (the section on “The Snapshots Menu” in the Help file should be of use) for more info.

All the best,
Keith

[oliviaweb]

Hi Keith,

I now understand …
I indeed expected a list of snapshots to show for the whole project and all the other confusion derived from that. I had actually read the tutorial, not once but twice, last time yesterday because of that particular question, but the fact that it is possible to take snapshots of several selected documents at once, or even of all text documents in the project, only reinforced my belief that I would find a project-wide repository of either single backed-up documents, or, for that matter, multiple-selections of documents shown under one single entry (like Snapshots of an “Edit Scrivenings”-text).

I am sorry to have caused you to spend time on all of this only to explain to me something that is a feature of Scrivener.
Many thanks again, however, for the super-fast and helpful responses from AmberV and you,
Mathilde

[KB]

No need to apologise at all! I think the current snapshots is a little confusing, which is why I’ve moved it to the inspector for 2.0. Having it in the inspector means that, just as with the synopsis and notes etc, it’s a lot more obvious that it is something that operates on a per-document basis. 1.x’s panel that doesn’t update itself certainly isn’t the best solution, but it’s one of the many things that wasn’t obvious during the initial design stage and which I realised as more people used Scrivener and as I used it myself.

All the best,
Keith