Hi. I’m using Scrivener to draft a PhD dissertation. Approximately every six weeks, I have to email a chunk of new writing to my principal advisor, and she provides comments in Word Track Changes prior to a Zoom consult. It’s much better to submit these chunks in a working document that contains all previous submissions and end-to-end section headings so that my advisor can see easily how the new bit fits in and what’s been (or will be) covered elsewhere. I can use compile to generate the draft I send, but how do I get back to Scrivener to continue writing. Ideally, I’d like to address the comments and add new writing in Scrivener, then return a document to the advisor showing the previous comments and how I have addressed them. But I don’t think I can do that. Am I right? How do other folks deals with this situation?
At best your advisor would use Scrivener too, but if that was an option you probably would have mentioned it.
After you get the new chunks—or the whole Drafts content if you had compiled that—back as docx with comments by your advisor you could re-import it with Import and Split. That will keep the chapter structure intact.
Theoretically you could use this new/commented content as a replacement of the previous, uncommented version. But I would strongly advise against that. Because then all the project metadata of the original Binder documents, like document links, notes, etc., would have been gone.
Probably the most feasible way would be to create a folder named “Commented Versions” or something like that. I would locate that folder on the same level as Drafts and Research. Then create sub-folders for every re-imported, commented docx. Name them by date or whatever is convenient for you.
Then use Split Screen with the Draft on one side and the commented text in the other. Then compare chapter by chapter. If your advisor only uses comments and does not alter the text itself, you just have to drag those comments from the returned document to the same position in the Draft documents (dragging copies them, by the way). Then re-work your Draft addressing your advisors suggestions.
Admittedly, that could be tedious and fiddly. But I don’t see how else it could work if you both use software that is fundamentally different to the software of the other one. Some Scrivener users in a similar situation switch to Word completely at a certain point in their workflow. But in my opinion that only makes sense when there is one final evaluation.