I would like to know if I can sync documents between different projects. Let me explain what I mean:
Say I have projects for each of the following:
All of my poetry
All of my essays
All of my short stories
Then half of those poems form a complete book, so I want to also keep those relevant poems in a separate project, yet keep them synced so that if I make changes in one to a synced poem, I don’t have to make changes in both projects to that poem.
This would require not even syncing an entire project, but only part of one, like a collection and/or a folder.
Then some, but not all of the poems I have taken to a separate project deal with a subject I am toying into making a book. More poems from all of my poetry do, too. So I want to make a new project with all relevant poems. (So now some of my poems should be synced between three projects.)
But wait! I also want to pull in a couple of essays and short stories into this new project.
I’m not sure if that makes sense. Is there any way that I can do this, even to a lesser extent, without mashing everything into one project, and without having to make multiple edits?
On the other hand, it is very easy to use the Compile options to create different output documents from a single project. So you could subdivide and sort the poems into various groups within a single project. You could also use keywords to create Collections without changing the underlying order of poems in the Binder.
If you right-click on a document in the binder, and choose “copy document link”, you’ll end up with something that looks vaguely like this:
x-scrivener-item:///Users/rguthrie/Dropbox/Writing/Shorts%20-%20Ideas%20-%20Exercises.scriv?id=611
You can paste that into any rich-text field (i.e. not the synopsis) in Scrivener, or add an external link in the References pane of the inspector. This won’t add an entry to the binder, but otherwise, when you click it, the other project will open up to the linked document.
You can compile a sub-set of compileable documents in a few different ways. My favorite is to create a collection of documents, and then in the compile window, in the Contents section, check the “Filter” check box, and then select “include”, “documents in collection”, and select the collection you want. Also, you’d want to select “included documents” in the “Compile:” drop-down list just above all that.
All files & folders that affect compilation have to be included in the collection, but the order (if I’m not mistaken) will depend on the binder, not the order of documents in the collection.
Alternately, you could just select your collection from the drop-down list near the top of the Contents pane of the compile window. It should start out with the top-level folder, whatever it’s named (Draft, Manuscript, etc…). Just select your collection there, and you’ll get a flat list of files, as seen in the collection. It’ll compile as if they’re all at “level 1”, if that means anything to you…