I’m new to Scrivener and looking for a specific function.
I am writing a nonfiction book and I have 1000+ pages of transcripts and notes. I’d like to be able to select passages within all those notes and tag them according to subject, then search by tag to round up all the passages on that subject.
I have seen numerous suggestions about tagging with and then searching for that , but that will give me only the location of the and not the chunk of text that makes up the whole passage.
I have also seen suggestions about dividing my notes into many chunks, but I hope you can see that with my volume that’s not an efficient approach.
There’s no way to assemble portions of documents into one view. Search results and Scrivenings view only allow for assembling lists of documents from the binder, not portions thereof.
So your best bet is to split up your documents as needed. You don’t have to split everything, just what you would tag; split off the beginning of the passage you want isolated, and then split off what comes after. Tag the new document using Custom Metadata (a drop-down list is nice in this case if you have a set of tags, and only need one per passage), or use keywords to drop multiple tags onto that passage.
You’d already have to read through, select, and tag passages anyway, so splitting those parts off isn’t all that much more tedious, especially if you jot down the relevant keyboard shortcuts on a sticky note next to your keyboard or on your monitor.
GR’s method should work. Here’s another method; I don’t know if this is what you’ve tried already, but here’s a painfully detailed description (I hope it helps):
To tag text:
Select the entire passage you’d like to tag.
Create an inspector comment (shift-cmd-*)
Add the tag you want to the comment
To find passages by the tag:
Using Project Search, select “all” in the dropdown menu
Search for your tag
Select all the documents in the search results.
Put your editor in Scrivenings mode and click the comments icon over the inspector.
You’ll see a list of comments containing your tag in the Inspector.
Click on each comment to see the text you tagged. This will scroll your Scrivenings to each passage in turn. Because you had the entire passage selected when you created the comment, the entire passage will be highlighted.
My interpretation was that MISSMLH wanted to assemble just the tagged passages (or a subset of passages tagged with a particular tag), and not the surrounding text in the document. …As in having a Scrivenings session, or even compiling, of the tagged passages and nothing else surrounding them.
Rdale, I read it differently in that he wanted to see the entire passage in context — but no matter! Whichever he thinks best, or even a third way that’s neither yours nor mine… it’s all good.
The approach of tagging with comments has proven to be the better match. My final step is to copy and paste the tagged passages into a new document. That’s easy to do with the editor split between 1) the passages found in the search and 2) a blank document.
