Neither of these are really critical but they’d be nice to have from my perspective:
[] Allow a different cork board background for each project – either internal or custom. I use the cork board background with a map or picture to save switching between views in Windows
[] Would it be possible for external references to be relative rather than the full physical path name? I keep my Scrivener projects in the dropbox folder and due to Corporate IT constraints the dropbox implementation on my business laptop has a different location than my desktop.
I’m pretty sure the project specific corkboard backgrounds thing is already on the list for consideration. It was originally meant to simply be a texture thing, and so not something that would necessarily need customisation per project, but if you give people a spot to insert a picture, they’ll do all kinds of creative things with it.
Regarding relative links, the problem is that the operating system wouldn’t interpret the link appropriately. Scrivener isn’t actually doing the execution of the link. It’s passing it to the OS, which handles locating the file resource, determining the default application to load it with, and then sending that application a message to load the file. So you might see the logical problem with that scenario immediately. Program X is utterly clueless as to where your Scrivener project is located, and so could not extrapolate the absolute path from a relatively supplied one.
Thanks for the detailed reply on the relative pathname. Makes sense now and as I’ve managed to make the pathnames consistent for my Dropbox implementations it should be a non-issue going forward.
Good stuff. On a Mac I’ve always recommended people use symbolic links to handle problems like this, if the actual directory names cannot be harmonised between systems. But I have since learned that in Windows Vista and greater you can make symbolic links as well (which differ from Shortcuts in that they can keep pointing to a spot even if that spot isn’t currently available, and to anything accessing it through programming layers, it functions just like the original file). So that’s another way to handle it as well. For a while, when I was migrating from one user name to another, I had a symlink in the Users folder pointing to another user folder. Works great.
You could do it such that the pathname as stored in the Scrivener project is a relative name, but just as it goes to be handed off to the OS, convert the relative path name to an absolute path name.
