Differentiating Comments and Scrivener Links
Comments and Scrivener Links share the exact same formatting, except for the highlight function. Having Comments and Scrivener Links have completely separate color and formatting options would be a significant improvement as they have very different purposes.
For instance, it makes little sense for comments to have automatic colored and underlined text in addition to the already highlighted area, but taking away the color and/or the underline out of a link makes little sense.
Updates to Comments
Having the Comments not have a box around the highlights makes much more sense as it decreases visual clutter. Having the option for it look just like highlights would be a significant improvement to decrease that visual clutter.
As a second update to Comments, iBooks, for example, has a little button beside the highlighted text if there is a note on it. Something similar for Comments would be great, because then the commented on text could actually be clicked into and edited without having to arrow into it!
An Update to Highlights and Comment Highlights
Looking again at iBooks’, it’s highlights and notes have a thin space between each line of text within the highlights. They look like separate lines. This is much better for reading as it doesn’t draw the eye to the wrong place. It keeps the eye on the same line.
Links are just links in the text system and there is no straightforward way of assigning a different colour to different types of links. Comments require links in order to be clickable.
If comments did not have the box around them, they would be indistinguishable from highlights, so this is not something that is going to be removed or made optional, sorry.
The way highlights appear (no gap between lines) is determined by Apples text system, the same as is used by TextEdit.
As for comment highlights not being level in that example, that is very strange and I have never seen that. Could you please attach (zipped up) a sample project showing the issue so that I can look at that? (I’m away for a few days now so won’t get chance to look at it until the end of next week, but would be very grateful if you could provide an example so that I can see it.)
Okay. That’s a little confusing since most other word processors I’ve used can distinguish between these two just fine. Perhaps a move away from comments being links in the future, since this seems like a common thing that most other word processors do just fine? I’m not sure how this works though. I only know that most other word processors I’ve used have different formatting for links and comments.
Just to clarify, I suggested some other indication, like a comment icon on the side, could be an alternative to the box to distinguish, and it could be clickable as well, since visual congestion aside, the entire comment being clickable does interfere with the process of editing.
I’m not arguing. Simply clarifying. (:
At the very least, could the box around it be updated so it’s thinner? It’s a bit blurry and indistinct and encroaches on text a lot more than it would if it was thinner.
Okay. I wasn’t aware that Scrivener couldn’t break away from that. Thanks.
