Many thanks. That is useful, for sure.
Your comments on Oct '21 and using your suggested approach of Jan '18 (both above) refer.
Am I correct in saying that the copying part (of all highlighted text of a specific style) only works across documents on the Mac version of Scrivener?
I tried it on Windows. It “highlights” across documents, but only “copies” (Ctrl-C) the non-sequential highlighted style in one document at a time.
I then tried append. That only appends the first instance of the highlighted (selected) style in the document in focus, irrespective of where I place my cursor, e.g. I appended with my mouse hovering over the last set of highlighted styled text, and it appended first set of highlighted styled text.
Why append? Because a user can apply a character style format through the Style menu while they work through their script one scene at a time, “marking” relevant elements of their human character of focus or building their world as they go along, which append stores in a central repository (on a character sheet or document in Notes or Research or wherever else of their choosing).
Right now, I can do it like this, one append at a time.
This leads to my next question. Is it possible to have a back-link when appending as a link back to the source material? I use linking to speed up other things I need on the fly so I wouldn’t want to use it for this purpose.
(FWIW, my ultimate goal is off topic, but needed the comments for context. This would be my optimal solution to inline tagging, avoiding the document level keywords and collections.)
Right, the technology to combine multiple discrete text sources into a single editor is not available in the Windows toolkit, so the effect is achieved by stacking multiple editors together with a “theme” that makes them look unified. It’s good for the majority of what people need for editing and writing, but some of the more esoteric capabilities like multiple selections of text being copied just aren’t possible because you’re looking at dozens of different independent views. The copy command can only “see” one view at a time.
This leads to my next question. Is it possible to have a back-link when appending as a link back to the source material? I use linking to speed up other things I need on the fly so I wouldn’t want to use it for this purpose.
I’d say “tagging”, in the sense of the original thread’s topic, may not be the best tool for the job anyway, and appending selections to notes is probably better, but that’s a bit subjective.
At any rate, no there is nothing like what you describe as a “back link” into the middle of the text like that. However in practice you should not have much of a need for that, for this purpose.
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Copy the text you need to locate its original placement from.
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Paste it into the Quick Search tool in the main toolbar, and the first result should be where you want to go (assuming you keep your draft folder higher in the binder list than your notes, as search results are printed in order).
With Quick Search you will note the first hit is always selected, meaning you need to click or move things around: just hit Enter to navigate, and on text result hits like this, it will scroll you right to the spot. Also note that
Alt+Enterwill open and target the other split, which might be preferable if you’re going through a list of things quickly, though the Back button is always handy for that too.
In essence: all of the benefits of a direct link, without all of the headache of making invisible anchors and addressing them in hyperlinks, as I’ve seen in some word processors.
Thank you.
The append, quick search and selection of the first result with Alt-Enter opening a split view approach works well for me.
That way, any inconsistencies in my appended character summary can be speedily searched, accessed and tweaked one at a time, no matter where in they are in the manuscript.
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