I’d like the ability to co-write a series of articles with a friend using Scrivener. I’ve downloaded Versions, per the suggestion on the Wiki, and have connected it to a subversion server. I’m not sure what to do next.
We’ll be writing a lot of material and then rearranging it into separate articles.
Do you have any suggestions how to best accomplish this. Thank you.
You’ll basically be treating the Scrivener project file as a controlled folder (which is exactly how Subversion will handle it). All of the individual bits of the project are stored as separate files and folders, so they’ll all be tracked individually. The first thing you need to do (though I assume since you’ve been on the wiki you know) is to make sure you have svn compatibility enabled. This causes Scrivener to write its control files as plain text instead of binary.
There are things to watch for. Scrivener creates new folders and files inside the project file, obviously, without communicating this to the SVN server or Versions. You’ll need to make sure these new files get committed as new resources. This is something Versions should be able to help you out with when it analyses the project folder. Other things are common sense. Make sure you don’t commit with the project open—and it really works best if the project is passed off back and forth rather than concurrent usage. Fortunately it is pretty easy to work with a side project in Scrivener as an “offline” copy. You can use the Backup Project To… menu command to create a duplicate of the version controlled copy, and then do side work in that while the collaborator has it checked out. Then integrate by dragging resources from one project to the other. Scrivener has comprehensive drag-and-drop support. Keywords, notes, and so on.
Finally do some forum searches on the topic, and specifically check out posts made by username ‘sophie’. She’s the most recent person to post results and things to watch for.