I’m looking for a way to put notes to myself in Scrivener. In MS Word, I’d “add comments” and the actual text would show up as highlighted, and my notes wouldn’t show up unless I rolled the mouse over the highlighted text or turned on “comment view.”
Visually, I’m not picky about how it looks. I’m not trying to recreate that exact function.
I’m trying to find a way to make a note to myself (ex: this dialogue is placeholder until I come up with something better, don’t forget to rewrite later). I am not looking to insert the note in the middle of the text; I want to be able to read the text w/o seeing the note, but have some indicator that a note is there.
I checked out “annoation” but that doesn’t seem to do the same thing, or I don’t know how to use it. I highlighted a phrase and it showed up in red and circled, but when I tried to write a note the original phrase disappeared and was written over by my note. I checked out “ghost notes” but that wasn’t the right thing, either.
“Annotation” is exactly what you want, because you can easily jump from one annotation to the next and make sure this way you don’t forget one.
You should give them more than a look, maybe. The principle is: You activate “Annotation Mode” (I do it by pressing CMD-SHIFT-A), write your note to yourself, deactivate annotation mode (I press CMD-SHIFT-A again) and continue to write your novel text.
An annotation can be a paragraph in itself (a note like “[insert description of dead body here]”), but can as well appear within the running text (something like “I still remember what I did when JFK was shot in 1961[check date!]”, he said.)
Do you mean the document notes? Click on the blue inspector button and look down at the bottom right. You have white space where you can type your notes. You use the arrows to make the note project wide or just for that document.
You should watch the demo video on the site. It shows most of the features of Scrivener.
Thanks, Andreas. So I turn on “annotation mode” to make the notes, then turn it off so I don’t have to look at them. Turn it back on when I want to see them again.
That it? Thanks!
Apollo, thanks for that, too. I did watch the demo when I first downloaded Scrivener. Since I don’t use most of the bells and whistles, I forget what they do. I’ll watch it again!
When I turned on the “annotation” the note I wrote showed up in blue. When I unclicked it, the note I wrote is still there, still blue.
Am I doing something wrong?
Is there a way to have the notes disappear out of the text until I’m ready to see them, as happens when you put “comments” in MS Word?
ETA: In addition, I just noticed that my annotation is showing up in my word count, which is a real problem for me. My notes to myself can be lengthy and their inclusion in word count can skew my ability to judge where I am in the manuscript.
Hi pooks, please search the forums for my full answers on both these questions, as they are asked here fairly frequently, but in short: no, there is no way to hide the comments (for technical reasons); annotations have to be counted in the live count because otherwise the calculations would slow down typing but you can get a count without them via the Project Statistics, and 2.0 will have a tooltip showing stats without annotations and footnotes.
All the best,
Keith
You cannot hide annotations completely, but try turning on “ghost mode” for annotations. It fades them to a very light colour that makes it easy to visually skip over as you read.