hello. i’m a new user just starting to get to grips with this software, and i’m trying to find out if scrivener has the possibility to “tag” (in some way) individual paragraphs or parts of documents (text fragments) so that if the “tagged” text is copied or moved elsewhere, the reference “tag” goes with it.
as far as i can tell, the tags for references, keywords or meta-data can only be applied to the whole of a “text fragment”, not to selected parts of one, such as individual paragraphs or a group of paragraphs.
the reason i’d like to do this is because i work a lot with different sources such as interviews or pubished texts. i need to tag these so that i don’t lose sight of their source if i move them to different parts of the project. many of them are so small that it wouldn’t be practical for each to be a separate text fragment in the binder. likewise, i’d like to avoid having to list the source in the body text [in brackets or some other form like a more traditional reference]. using notes is not a very practical way to do this either.
You can attach comments to words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. If cut or copied and pasted, the comments carry over to new documents/places. Comments can be removed during compile (but they remain in the original Scrivener file, of course). Would this do what you want?
“Comments” is what I meant when I mistakenly said “notes” … The problem with this is the way it formats the whole view of the text with the highlight and underligning.
Getting closer, but this still leaves the body text attached to the comment highlighted … and I tried changing the Notes background colour to white in Editor and QuickReference under Customizable Colors.
I’m still not sure if Comments is really what I’m looking for, or if I’m asking for a feature that isn’t part of Scrivener. It also messes with the cursor a bit …
How would you tell if a comment is attached to a particular part of the text if it wasn’t highlighted? You can certainly change the comment color to be less obtrusive, but don’t you need to be able to tell what text is attached to a comment, and what text isn’t?
You could just add an asterisk to your text and comment on that if it’s less obtrusive, and use the Replacements tab of the compile window to strip those characters out, but you’d still want to be able to visually tell where that comment was anchored, wouldn’t you?
Scrivener is the artist’s palette and sketchbook. Compile is the finished masterpiece. Only the artist gets to see the palette and sketchbook. Does it matter if there is minor highlighting when it is for your eyes only? Too distracting?
Would RDG’s asterisk-based solution work more suitably for you?
I appreciate both your points, and please don’t get me wrong - I’m not dissing Scrivener ! Only trying to twist it a little for my needs.
I do find the highlighting of the comment link distracting (even if I change the background to white leaving only the outline). The thing is that I don’t particularly need to see the comment unless I look or ask for it - I just don’t want to lose track of the attribution /source if I need to check it at a later date.
Probably the feature I’m looking for, which isn’t currently offered, is the possibility to selectively attribute a portion of text (or any number of portions of the text) to a particular reference or citation.
In the future there will be an toggle you can use to hide markup such as the highlighting around comments. So if you want a “reading mode” or simply prefer to fly blind while working, you’d be able to.
On that, I must admit to not quite understanding what this concept would provide that Comments or Inline Annotations do not already do (or to put it another way, how your concept would be any less “in the way” than they are). To be clear, I completely understand what you are saying about formatting overload. This feature was designed more around the concept of highlight maybe one sentence and jotting down a note like “Check sources”, rather than highlighting whole sections of documents. Given how the mouse cannot easily place the cursor inside these ranges, that right there effectively limits their usefulness for large blocks of text.
Do you have an example from a program with a downloadable demo that I could take a look at?
Remember that a “document” can be as short as you like, even just a few sentences. So one alternative is to place the text you want to tag in its own document, making the whole array of Scrivener metadata available. That approach also facilitates moving the chunks within the project.
As kewms has mentioned, documents can be as short as you want. Given that you said you wanted to tag paragraphs, then this is easily achieved by making a paragraph it’s own document! Further, because a document and a folder are interchangeable in Scrivener, you can nest these paragraph documents within “parent” documents in the binder to keep the structure clear. Note that, with Scrivener’s “scrivenings mode”, then there is virtually no difference in the editor - you can still work with all the text visible, but could now “tag” individual paragraphs however you wish.
If you want to see an earlier discussion about tagging and annotating text for qualitative research (which sounds similar to what you are doing) you might be interested in this thread.
