Use of colours in Inspector Comments

Scrivener
1

I’d like to know how others make use of the feature to have inspector comments in different colours.

  • Do you use colours at all?
  • If yes, how? Did you set guidelines for yourself? (Importance of comment? Type of comment?)

Up to now, I’ve let comments in default “post it”-yellow. But then I got feedback from my editor, which I transfered into the Scrivener project, and I coloured all his comments red. And then comments from another reader in green.

What are your experiences?

2

:frowning:

Nobody? Really??

:confused:

3

The specifics change per project, but here is what I’m using right now:

  • Red: Problematic stuff
  • Orange: Tables (matched with orange highlighter for the cross-reference text itself)
  • Yellow: General usage
  • Green: Unused
  • Blue: Windows notes (for the manual project)
  • Purple: Figures (matched with pink highlighter for cross-reference text itself)

The two table and figure ones: I just use those to mark the position of any such things—this way I can quickly find them by glancing in the notes column and clicking on the illustration or table that I’m looking for. I put the cross-reference ID in the comment to make that bit easier.

Normally I use inline annotations for most of this kind of stuff, but in the manual project I use inlines for typesetting hints, so I have to avoid them for that. Nonetheless, I find linked notes to be quite useful for the table and figure thing, and would probably use a system like that even if inlines were free.

4

Aw, sorry, I saw this and meant to reply! In brief, I use the colors for a few different things; depends on the project. Mostly they refer to the type of comment, but in some cases that also translates to a time-schedule or priority as far as meaning what I need to do to act on it. For instance, in a project that had some foreign text, I’d use one color of comment to provide the translation for my reference. I’ll use a specific color for “double-check this fact” (or sometimes “check this fact” if I hadn’t really done any research on it at all yet)–that could be anything from needing to do real-world research to just taking a moment to go check my own blueprints of the setting that I just didn’t want to go hunting for at the moment while writing. Yellow, being the default, tends to catch everything before I change it but mostly ends up as me babbling to myself on sections–thoughts about what I like or don’t like in a given section of text, too indefinite to act on immediately (unlike “Go look up that article and see what it says about plexiglass temperatures” which may take longer than I think it should but at least has an obvious direction to take with it).

Notes that are “don’t forget this, but you don’t have to do anything about it until much later” are another color. Also I’ve played around a little with using comments more specifically as bookmarks, so I can pull out important bits of scenes that I may need to refer back to later, and those get a “bookmark” color which helps set them apart. And some comments that are just me making sarcastic margin notes about my writing to my collaborator end up as another color, if I’m feeling generous or want to procrastinate. :slight_smile:

5

OK, I’ll own up. This is how I used them when reading through the 8th draft, before doing the final rewrite on my last novel:

Yellow: Change format/title
Orange: Change word
Red: Editing comment
Green: Insert sthg in a previous scene
Blue: Scene too long: cut it
Purple: plot change/development

I doubt this will help anyone else, though. :unamused:

cw