The Inspector? A Detailed Explanation Please.

[NamoNakiMichi]

@rdale

I’ll take a stab at bookmarks.

Bookmarks are links to other documents, and those documents fall into 3 categories: Documents within the same Scrivener project, external website URLs, and files on the same computer that are external to the Scrivener project.

A bookmark to a document in the same project will display the contents of that document in the pane below the bookmarks in the Inspector. If the document is a Scrivener text document, you can also edit the text there. If the document can be “displayed” in a Scrivener editor but not edited (ex: PDFs, sound files, web archives), then you can still interact with those files in that part of the Inspector.

External websites just load as a web page. This functionallity is somewhat limited, as Scrivener doesn’t contain a full-fledge web browser, and so may not be able to render a page well, or get past the logon screen. You can double-click on the bookmark to open that website in your default browser, however.

External files on your Mac are the third kind of bookmark you can make. This is the most fragile kind, and the one I’m least familiar with. I think that it can’t track re-names or moves of the bookmarked files, so I tend not to link to external files. External files can also include URLs that other programs provide, including Scrivener links to specific documents in other projects. If you use the Edit/Copy Special/Copy Document as External Link menu in one project, you can paste that string into the link field when creating an external file bookmark; when you then click on that bookmark, it will open that project in another window, and open the specific document in an editor within that window.

I use the first kind of bookmark all the time. It’s quite useful for fiction–if you keep documents on each character, you can bookmark that character’s document in each chapter they appear in, adding notes about that character as they emerge in the telling of the story. In this way, bookmarked documents are often better than document notes, which are only visible when you are editing the document they’re associated with. The same character info may be useful across several chapters.

I’m sure there are similarly handy note-taking applications for use in writing non-fiction.

Wow, first off, thank you for explaining each of the different bookmarks! I didn’t realize that there were multiple. I think the first option you mentioned will probably be the most useful to me, as well as the third, if I were to keep things in one dedicated folder. The third one will help me scale down the size of my main project file, right now it’s sitting at around 30 gigs, because I tend to dump everything into it that I need or will need later. So perhaps if I can figure out this third option, I won’t need to do that anymore and my save time and back up time will be cut down dramatically. As right now, it takes around 30 minutes or so to save and back up my main project. This is very helpful. Thanks again.

[legacy_rdale]

I’m glad that’s helpful. Bookmarks are one of my favorite features that came with version 3.

One thing I failed to mention, there’s a drop-down item that lets you toggle between “Document Bookmarks” and “Project bookmarks”, located just above the bookmarks pane. Clicking on whichever phrase is displayed exposes the other option to toggle between them, in case you prefer to keep one list of bookmarks per project, or per binder entry.

[NamoNakiMichi]

@rdale

I’m glad that’s helpful. Bookmarks are one of my favorite features that came with version 3.

One thing I failed to mention, there’s a drop-down item that lets you toggle between “Document Bookmarks” and “Project bookmarks”, located just above the bookmarks pane. Clicking on whichever phrase is displayed exposes the other option to toggle between them, in case you prefer to keep one list of bookmarks per project, or per binder entry.

AH! I see now! Thank you so much for the clarification, I had to really zoom in on my mag to see that tiny up/down mark, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it had you not mentioned it and VoiceOver doesn’t recognize it as a clickable option.

[AmberV]

Note you can switch between Project and Document Bookmarks with the Command 6 shortcut, which will be easier than operating the small control. Bookmarks are very useful! You mentioned duplicating sections, to have a separate copy for old revisions. Here is a trick: you can drag the new copy into the old copy’s Document Bookmark list, and in doing so it will add a back-link bookmark to the other copy, so now both are linked together and can be referenced one from the other.

Even better, when you duplicate, the bookmarks get duplicated as well—so you may see where this is going: if you continue dragging the previous version into the new duplicate’s bookmark list, that list will grow over time to contain each revision—and since they back-link, the most recent version will have the full complete list of all previous versions.

Thus you don’t have to keep these together in the binder for them to be readily accessible. And since you can delete old bookmarks you don’t need, and that deletion will be retained duplicating forward, you can manage what is important to keep at your fingertips.

It’s probably worth pointing out that what this does kind of emulates what Snapshots do. It’s pretty much the same idea: each item has a list of older versions in its sidebar that you can easily reference. You can use them right in the sidebar, or you can right-click in the editor header bar and load them straight into the editor too. And by holding down the Option key when doing that, you can load them in comparison mode, which highlights the differences between the snapshot you loaded and the current version. While this is indeed on the surface a visual tool, you can customise the colours if the defaults are too subtle, and additionally there are shortcuts in the Documents, Snapshots, Show Changes submenu for jumping from one change to the next, and as well for changing the granularity (if every single word change is too much). Those are Control Command Left-Square-Bracket and Control Command Right-Square-Bracket.

The main difference between the two is that one is dedicated toward this purpose, while the other is what you might consider an “assembled feature” from Scrivener’s freeform toolchest approach. With that dedication, you get tools like the Snapshots Manager, for bulk management and searching across old revisions, a dedicated keyboard shortcut for cutting to a new revision at any time (Command 5), and most importantly: revisions do not generate clutter—with the potential for confusion, in the binder—they are all tucked away in a “stack” beneath the chunk of outline they relate to. Lastly, they cannot be edited, even forcefully. They are hard locked and the only thing you can do with one after you’ve made one is delete it.

On the other hand, assembling your own features gives you a lot of flexibility! You can ultimately do more with duplication in the end.

[NamoNakiMichi]

@AmberV

Note you can switch between Project and Document Bookmarks with the Command 6 shortcut, which will be easier than operating the small control. Bookmarks are very useful! You mentioned duplicating sections, to have a separate copy for old revisions. Here is a trick: you can drag the new copy into the old copy’s Document Bookmark list, and in doing so it will add a back-link bookmark to the other copy, so now both are linked together and can be referenced one from the other.

Even better, when you duplicate, the bookmarks get duplicated as well—so you may see where this is going: if you continue dragging the previous version into the new duplicate’s bookmark list, that list will grow over time to contain each revision—and since they back-link, the most recent version will have the full complete list of all previous versions.

Thus you don’t have to keep these together in the binder for them to be readily accessible. And since you can delete old bookmarks you don’t need, and that deletion will be retained duplicating forward, you can manage what is important to keep at your fingertips.

It’s probably worth pointing out that what this does kind of emulates what Snapshots do. It’s pretty much the same idea: each item has a list of older versions in its sidebar that you can easily reference. You can use them right in the sidebar, or you can right-click in the editor header bar and load them straight into the editor too. And by holding down the Option key when doing that, you can load them in comparison mode, which highlights the differences between the snapshot you loaded and the current version. While this is indeed on the surface a visual tool, you can customise the colours if the defaults are too subtle, and additionally there are shortcuts in the Documents, Snapshots, Show Changes submenu for jumping from one change to the next, and as well for changing the granularity (if every single word change is too much). Those are Control Command Left-Square-Bracket and Control Command Right-Square-Bracket.

The main difference between the two is that one is dedicated toward this purpose, while the other is what you might consider an “assembled feature” from Scrivener’s freeform toolchest approach. With that dedication, you get tools like the Snapshots Manager, for bulk management and searching across old revisions, a dedicated keyboard shortcut for cutting to a new revision at any time (Command 5), and most importantly: revisions do not generate clutter—with the potential for confusion, in the binder—they are all tucked away in a “stack” beneath the chunk of outline they relate to. Lastly, they cannot be edited, even forcefully. They are hard locked and the only thing you can do with one after you’ve made one is delete it.

On the other hand, assembling your own features gives you a lot of flexibility! You can ultimately do more with duplication in the end.

Wow, I didn’t know any of this! It makes me wonder, for as much as I thought I knew about this program that I use day in and day out, how much do I not know? It will take a bit to get used to doing things this way consistently, but I think once I do it a few times, it will probably be the only way that I do it. Thanks for pointing this out to me in a non-visual way as well.

I do have another question though. Is there a master list available for download or copy, for all the keyboard shortcuts/commands that would help me use Scrivener easier?

[AmberV]

You’re welcome!

Keyboard shortcut list: in a sense, yes. It is found in the downloadable user manual project. There is a “Mac Shortcuts” collection in there, which is best viewed on the Outliner. With the cursor in the editor, use Navigate, Go To, Collection, Mac Shortcuts.

It’s not 100% complete, but pretty close. There are a few things that have shortcuts that do not have menu commands, like the aforementioned switch between document and project bookmarks. That’s just hard coded in somewhere.