I want to instantly show/hide specific Text in a Document. Is this possible in Scrivener?
If not, does anyone know a software that can do this?
More Detailed:
For example I want to write some comments in a certain color directly inside to the Document and want to quickly turn the visibility of these comments on/off. (like a filter)
It does not necessarily need to be a color… it also could be a specific style that can be toggled on/off.
Any Ideas of possible workarounds to accomplish this are welcome.
If you use Inline annotations and highlight the annotation and right click, there is the option to remove color. when you do this the text disappears in the editor. To reverse highlight, right click and give a color.
Thank you GoalieDad. Removing the color did not work for me.
I guess this works only in a light theme - probably because there is white text on white background after removing the color. I use a dark theme.
Anyhow… this approach would be too complicated in may case since I want to be able to toggle it on a document level - not just for selected text.
I guess you could use the Replacements function for that, but it would be a complicated setup for what you want to do.
In the Compile Overview window, select the right-most icon above the right hand side column. Enter a text to Replace, and a longer text as the Replacement.
In your document, add the text to replace. It will be Compiled showing the Replacement text.
I am wondering if you searched the forum for discussions on this? I tried a very basic search for “hide text” and came up piles of existing discussions on this, stretching all the way back to 2006. Here are a few that go over different aspects:
Hiding inline annotations in the Editor window. The first tip given is the closet you’ll get to a toggle. You mentioned knowing about comments, but not inline annotations, or that you can easily switch between them.
Hiding annotations. This post goes into the technical limitations of why this cannot be done, as well as offering some ways of minimising the appearance of annotations.
Further on hiding annotations. A very old post from the Scrivener beta days, explaining in greater detail the technical limitations of why this cannot be done.
@AntoniDol Thank you. You are right… this is a bit too complicated
@AmberV Yes, I did a search, before I posted and was quite surprised that I have found nothing! maybe I accidentally searched in a wrong section.
Thank you so much for the links. Yes, the first one looks good. I gave it a quick test and it worked! It is not exactly what I was looking for, but it gets close. I also looked at the others, but I certainly have to give it some more time.
Yeah! That’s a pretty good way of handling the problem (given the software limitations naturally). I do wish these commands were in the custom shortcut list so that it could be made even more efficient though.
After spending some with this I have some thoughts about it.
The “transformations” approach has two downsides.
it seems like it does not work with scrivenings and has to be done individually for each document
when I apply this, there is still a “leftover” Bubble for each annotation that is “hidden”
I spent some time reading through the other threads you linked to and one post seemed particularly interesting. Hiding annotations in Scrivener 2.0? - #11 by MimeticMouton It is about the the annotation color to background color solution that GoalieDad was referring to.
The results were in part better… but it also had a few downsides.
it works globally
no leftover bubbles
BUT
switching back and forth is too complicated
does not work correctly if the backgroundcolor is different in “composition mode”
I could only find the settings to do this for Inline Footnotes - not for Inline Annotations. I changed the color for Inline Footnotes at Options>Appearance>Textual Marks>Colors>Footnotes Background AND Inline Footnotes Text and was setting both values to the color of the background by clicking on “Pick Screen Color” and then sampling the BG Color.
Anyhow… according to what was written in the other posts it seems that there once was made quite some effort to implement such a feature but it finally was dropped after it turned out that is not possible due to some technical limitations.
I think implementing a clean version of the “set font color to BG color” solution to scrivener that automatically reads the active background color and sets the Comments color accordingly would make a lot of people happy.
In case you talk from time to time to the Devs you maybe could mention it.
Right, that should be fixed but has yet to be. It is more complicated as Scrivenings view is really a stack of, well, you can almost think of it like separate windows, but they are being combined together into one scroll area and made to look like a single seamless editor. That’s why you can’t Ctrl+A to select everything, for example.
None of that is in accordance with the original design, it should be one single editor with multiple sources, but it would require radical changes to the underlying framework to achieve that.
In the meanwhile we’ve been trying to patch commands like this one to work across editors. Stuff like this aren’t super high priority though, considering few people these commands on a regular basis.
Overall the idea here is meant more of a thing you would toggle while proofing a section to clean it up, rather than something you would regularly toggle for the entirety of the work.
when I apply this, there is still a “leftover” Bubble for each annotation that is “hidden”
Sorry I don’t know what that refers to. How are you seeing it if it is hidden?
As to the global annotation setting, I shouldn’t have linked to that one in retrospect. This is referring to a point in time when the design was incomplete. Inline annotations were always meant to be individually coloured, so they can be colour-coded. Instead of doing things that way though, they took a short-cut and made them all the same colour and that is how it was for years. It had a setting, like Footnotes now do.
That’s not left over from the annotation, that’s the comment highlight. Of course ordinarily you would highlight the text that is relevant to the comment rather than just one word like this, but the conversion tool isn’t that smart. You might want to have a look at Chapter 18 in the user manual, and more specifically §18.2–4, for various basic explanations of what these features are, and tips on how to use them (in .4). But the tutorial, from the screenshot, also has a section on them that goes over the dirt basics on what they look like, etc.
Also note the View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Hide Markup menu command, to temporarily hide markings like these.
Thank you Amber, for this informative and detailed explanation. Especially that last line was helpful.
Final conclusion for me is that basically everything is in place with the exception of not being able to run the transformations command on scrivenings - which in my particular case makes this not practical.
Maybe this will change sometime in the future. ; )
Hopefully that can be made more powerful in the future, yes! I mean, some day it would be great if we can get it all working the way it was meant to, like being able to select the entire Scrivenings and copy and paste it, stuff like that. But like I said, it’s something that would require some rather intensive and complicated reinvention without the tools to safely say “this paragraph here in this text editor comes from that file over there, save changes made to it into that file”.
Overall though, these are a good pair of features to use for this kind of work, as the compiler has a lot of built-in support for handling them. They will of course be omitted by default, but they can also be included in a variety of different ways, from word processor style sidebar comments, to footnotes, or even inline text that is coloured differently.
You might want to have a look at Chapter 18 in the user manual, and more specifically §18.2–4, for various basic explanations of what these features are, and tips on how to use them (in .4). But the tutorial, from the screenshot, also has a section on them that goes over the dirt basics on what they look like, etc.