I kinda like iWork’s Pages’ comment feature where you can highlight a word or paragraph or whatever and add in your own comments. And iirc, Word has something similar. But it’s too much work to copy the manuscript into a word processer, mark-it up, and then have the other person switch back and forth between scrivener and your mark-up. Frankly, my friends and I just wanna exchange Scrivener files to keep the workflow simple.
I guess I could use Scrivener’s highlights and annotations. I guess I wish there were a way to separate the annotations from the manuscript but I guess that’s what ghost notes is for?
A few tips: When using the annotation feature, put your initials at the front of it followed by a colon. Then make sure the Annotation label separator is set to [b]:[/b] in the Typography section of preferences. Now when you use ghost notes, just the initials will pop out from the manuscript and the rest will be dimmed. The next thing you can do is use the annotation locator (Cmd-Ctrl-A) and specify that you only want to find annotations with specified text. Here you can include your friend’s initials and then just use the Next and Previous buttons to scroll through the entire document by note type. You might wish to adopt some kind of version nomenclature as well. Something like [b]Av-1: comment[/b]. That way you can search not only by originator, but by version, excluding all of their old messages. Finally you can use the [b]File/Export/Annotations[/b] feature to create an RTF file containing only notes, including originating document titles if desired. One last tip: A good way to wipe out all notes is to Snapshot the document, then [b]Edit/Copy without annotations or footnotes[/b] and then paste directly back into the document. Now you have a clean slate and a record of all old notes in snapshots if you need it.
So yes, this is the best way to do things, as there are a number of features for streamlining this process.
Another way to go: Bold-face does not appear often in drafts, so I make my comments in bold. It’s simple to turn it off with Cmd-b, and the remarks really stand out.