track changes

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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How do I track changes in scrivener?

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Tracking changes in Scrivener does not work the same as you might be used to if you’re using programs such as Word or other word processors.

First, you should open the manual (which you can do from the Help menu) and look for section 18.6 on marking revisions. That should give you an overview of how Scrivener’s revision system works – and if you have any specific questions about anything that you’ve read that you can’t easily figure out by playing with it a little bit, then someone here should probably be able to answer those specific questions.

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thank you very much. I will go read that now. :slight_smile:

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Here are a couple of posts for further reading, as well:

  • On Marking Text for Deletion. While this more specifically addresses one thing you might wish to do with tracking revisions, it’s worth noting that the Revisions feature devinganger notes above is compatible with striking out text. If you have a revision mode enabled, it will use that current colour for it, and will be included when walking through adjustments with the Find by Formatting tool.
  • Tracking edits in detail. In this post, I go into some of the techniques I use to track revisions at both the micro and macro scale, under the Keeping Track of Edits heading. It’s not all about fixing typos and poorly phrased sentences, but something we need to get a good sense of how the whole fits together and evolves through the revision process. Scrivener’s “big picture” philosophy of design grants it with some exceptional tools for tracking things at the larger scale.
  • Further Strategies for Revisions: This post is an earlier revision of the above, but it also goes over effective use of the Snapshots feature, which can be thought of as an alternative to active marking with Revisions. The two can be used together of course, as well, but with Snapshot comparisons, you can have the software track what has changed for you, and without having to remember to turn the modes on and off. It’s a different way of thinking about it, since word processors generally don’t grant you the ability to fork the text and then freely work on a chunk of it, and later reference previous states of that text with change markings. So it might feel a bit odd at first to be plunging into the text directly and making edits with no regard for tracking them—but it’s also a safe option to try out. If you don’t like how it goes, you can easily copy and paste the Comparison result into the editor to get a marked up copy. Give it a little test and see how it goes.

If you search the forum for “track changes”, you are likely to come across a number of threads where others have shared their techniques, as well.

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I have been using, and enjoying, revision mode in Scrivener but a couple of issues:

  1. I can’t seem to globably move through revisions. When I go to Format:Revision:Remove current revision color it only does it for the one document I am looking at! Which would mean I would have to do it dozens of times.
  2. Is there a way to ‘search’ for a current or other revision?
  3. And sometimes one or more of the revision colors won’t go away when I do ‘remove all revisions’
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  1. I don’t seem to have that issue myself, though I am trying from Scrivenings mode, as that is the only place where you can edit multiple text chunks simultaneously. Come to think of it though, try this one on the Mac, if you’re on your PC at the moment. The PC version still struggles to consider a scrivenings session as one singular text, given platform limitations.
  2. Edit ▸ Find ▸ Find by Formatting… is always the command to check first, when wondering if Scrivener can find a particular type of formatting.
  3. It’s based on precise colour matching. If for some reason the colour drifted over time thanks to workflow practices (using other editors in import/export round tripping, etc.), then just delete the colour yourself with the text colour tool. All revision mode does is colour your edits.
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When I open in scrivenings mode the option ‘remove color from all revisions’ and ‘from this revision’ are greyed out :frowning:

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That doesn’t sound like you’re editing text at all, at that point, and I’d suspect most of your Format menu is disabled in that case. The difference between platforms is that on the Mac, all text chunks in the session will be cleaned, on Windows only the one the cursor is in, and then you get that one-by-one problem you described.

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Oh, wow, thanks, that fixed it. I didn’t have the cursor in the text :frowning: You great!!