Text Card Visibility Option?

[geoffstrout]

I love Scrivener and find it very useful in many different scenarios! However, I was wondering if I could suggest a new feature!
[size=85](I initially posted in another section. Apologies for the duplication!)[/size]

How about a ‘Visibility’ option for each Text Note, with a visible ‘Eye’ indicator like in graphics programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop.

In Photoshop (and in most graphics programs from other companies) you can simply click a box to ‘Hide’ or ‘Unhide’ an information source. This makes for much easier organization and manipulation of multiple simultaneous sources of information (in this case Layers of visual data).

How about adding a ‘Visibility’ column with an ‘Eye’ icon to indicate the Visibilty of each Text Card in the ‘Binder’ column? Or how about just adding a ‘Visibility’ option in the Context Menu that toggles the ‘Visibility’ status.

You could display the ‘Invisible’ Text Cards Icon and Text with a lighter color/value than the ‘Visible’ ones, making it easy to see at a glance which Text Cards will be included in the final Compiled version and which will be excluded.

I imagine this would allow for an easier workflow while writing.

Consider this hypothetical example:

You are writing your Thesis or Novel but have come up with multiple ideas or revisions for each of your 10 (or more) main ideas. You don’t want to lose that additional information because you might want to later revert or refer to it or potentially reuse it for another purpose. You also don’t want to have to store that information in a separate location because in the future you anticipate that these ideas will be more mentally associated this piece of writing than anything else.

With this ‘visibility’ feature, you just type the multiple ideas onto as many additional Text Cards as you need and make them ‘Invisible’ to the compiler. You can even ‘Nest’ them hierarchically under the currently ‘Visible’ Text Card for easy reference. That way only the ‘Final’ version will be included when you compile, but you still retain all your prior work in case it is needed later.

This would be a game-changer for me! I currently use Scrivener only every now and then. But this feature would motivate me to keep using this software for the bulk of my writing!

I know the feature I’m describing is something used in most graphics software and Scrivener is designed for writers and not visual artists, but where is it written that the two fields can’t learn from one another?

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And if you want to get complicated, I imagine that you could store that ‘Visibility’ data individually for different ‘Collections’ so that you can have multiple revisions/arrangements of your information simultaneously accessible at any given time. (Long Edit, Short Edit, etc)

[reepicheep]

As a user I don’t see the need for this. In the Mac version I use the Document Notes feature for exactly this purpose. And Project Notes can provide the same feature too. There’s also the Scratchpad which is there for notes across projects but that can be sent to a specific one later. Comments also might serve the same purpose. (No idea how many of these are in the Windows version I only use the Mac one.)

[MrGruff]

It strikes me you are describing the ‘include in compile’ setting, with an additional viewing option on the binder. You could achieve a similar effect by viewing the outliner, with the ‘include in compile’ column showing.

Alternatively, you could:

1. Rename the project labels to progress and set up a number of values (draft, note, final etc) with colours assigned to them (I use light colours for notes, moving to darker colours for more final states).*
2. Then, use the View option use progress colour in binder. That colours the binder items according to their progress value, so you can see what is ready – or what will not be used this time round.
3. Finally, when you come to compile, filter the compile so it only includes documents with the progress of final.

I think that gives you pretty much everything you were describing.

*The benefit of doing this, rather than going with the existing status is precisely that you can colour the binder with labels, but you can’t do that with status.