Monday
Jan312011
How to make simple manuscript comments in Scrivener
Monday, January 31, 2011 at 9:07AM
I like making comments on a manuscript throughout every part of its development. Some go in a book diary. Some need to go into the actual draft itself as it's growing. Scrivener has a very simple and clever way to handle the latter. Let's take a look.
First, put your cursor into the place where you want the comment to appear.
Hit the comment button in the toolbar and you can type a comment which will appear in the Inspector bar whenever you select the comments icon, right, which you find at the foot of the column -- it's the icon selected here with the 'n' in it.
We now have a comment, tied to a particular line, its presence announced by that yellow colour in the draft.
Nice and easy and obvious, the way writing should be. You can edit out the name and time stamp by the way. There are a couple of extras you may have missed though. First, you can see your comments in full screen mode if you choose, which is a good way of dealing with revisions.
Even better, if you like to do your final revision in Word or Pages, you can pass on those comments to those apps in your exported final draft. There's just a small trick involved in this. Do not export the file as a Word document since, thanks to something within OS X, that will strip the comments. Instead use an rtf compile like this...
That will give you a document that Word (Mac or Windows) and Pages will both import and convert. And the comments will still be there...
This is immensely powerful stuff and opens up lots of different possibilities for managing your work. Here's one that could appeal to anyone involved in a collaboration. Imagine: you're boss of the collab, using a Mac, and your co-author works with a Windows PC and Word on the other side of the world. How the hell do you work together? Easily...
Set up a Dropbox account to which you both have private access. Then use Scrivener's sync feature to export your manuscript to a shared folder there.
And make sure the export is in rtf export format.
Your collaborator will be able to edit the individual scene files with Word, see your comments and add some of his/her own. When they save them back to the Dropbox folder Scrivener will back up the original version of the scenes and import the new ones, along with comments.
The one drawback I can see is that your collaborator will see the project as individual files, not as a whole manuscript. Can't think of an easy way round that, except to persuade them to get a Mac and use Scrivener as well. But perhaps someone else can come up with a workaround.
Any way you look at it though this is a great way to insert comments into a work in progress, and have them carry over into other, more mainstream word processors.
First, put your cursor into the place where you want the comment to appear.
Hit the comment button in the toolbar and you can type a comment which will appear in the Inspector bar whenever you select the comments icon, right, which you find at the foot of the column -- it's the icon selected here with the 'n' in it.We now have a comment, tied to a particular line, its presence announced by that yellow colour in the draft.
Nice and easy and obvious, the way writing should be. You can edit out the name and time stamp by the way. There are a couple of extras you may have missed though. First, you can see your comments in full screen mode if you choose, which is a good way of dealing with revisions.
Even better, if you like to do your final revision in Word or Pages, you can pass on those comments to those apps in your exported final draft. There's just a small trick involved in this. Do not export the file as a Word document since, thanks to something within OS X, that will strip the comments. Instead use an rtf compile like this...
That will give you a document that Word (Mac or Windows) and Pages will both import and convert. And the comments will still be there...
This is immensely powerful stuff and opens up lots of different possibilities for managing your work. Here's one that could appeal to anyone involved in a collaboration. Imagine: you're boss of the collab, using a Mac, and your co-author works with a Windows PC and Word on the other side of the world. How the hell do you work together? Easily...
Set up a Dropbox account to which you both have private access. Then use Scrivener's sync feature to export your manuscript to a shared folder there.
And make sure the export is in rtf export format.
Your collaborator will be able to edit the individual scene files with Word, see your comments and add some of his/her own. When they save them back to the Dropbox folder Scrivener will back up the original version of the scenes and import the new ones, along with comments.
The one drawback I can see is that your collaborator will see the project as individual files, not as a whole manuscript. Can't think of an easy way round that, except to persuade them to get a Mac and use Scrivener as well. But perhaps someone else can come up with a workaround.
Any way you look at it though this is a great way to insert comments into a work in progress, and have them carry over into other, more mainstream word processors.
Reader Comments (10)
Since my editor uses Windows, I was forced to complete the final drafts of my first novel, The Well, in Word. The turned the process which into something which was (to say the least) far more cumbersome, when you are used to Scrivener. The above process - and the advent of Scrivener for Windows - should not only help my writing, but also my editing - enormously. Thanks David.
I still like to do the final draft in Word actually. You get to see the whole thing, not its component parts, which is how readers will view it. Not sure whether these features will all make it into Scrivener for Windows frankly - it is one version behind the Mac I'm afraid.
Excellent - great to see it visually. I love and use Scrivener for all my writing but find 'compile' a tad complex. Thanks for this, David.
Compile's only a tad complex? Much harder than that for me. Don't understand a lot of what's going on there frankly, but I suspect most people don't need to.
I'm so excited about this feature. Thanks for a great overview!
Just hope I can remember where to find these tips when I am finally ready to compile....still a few days off, I am afraid...thanks for the wonder posts....
The Scrivener Forum - you can go there through the Help menu is always a good place to get direct individual help too... Unless you want comments a plain rtf export to Word or Pages works fine in my experience.
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Be very careful using Dropbox to store Scrivener "projects" as in the example of collaborating across platforms. Dropbox handles a project not as a file, but as a folder. It is possible to lose a lot of work if you save a project to Dropbox in hopes of opening it on a computer other than the one from which it was saved.
Instead, back up the project to Dropbox, selecting the "zip" option. Then Dropbox will have but a single "file" to deal with and the integrity of your project will be ensured. To open it on a different computer, first download the zipped backup from Dropbox, then extract the project and work on it, then back it up to Dropbox as a "zip" file once again.
Don't make the mistake I did, not comprehending that a Scrivener project is not a file, but a folder with complex indices. I lost many hours of writing as the fruit of my ignorance. It cannot be recovered.
I have written about that quite a lot. The interesting thing is that Keith, Scrivener's developer, now says he stores the original Scrivener file in Dropbox, against all usual advice, because he thinks the risk is low. Though he does make sure to back up each time elsewhere.