version control

[davidrcalvert]

I would like to see a better method for version control. it should be more automatic not having to yah
ke a snapshot each time. Also there should be a way to attach notes/ meta data to provide a reference as to what the version entails.

Thanks,
David

[KB]

Hi David,

You can already add a title to snapshots as a reminder of what they were for. There are no plans in the near future to add anything like track changes, though, as that is an incredibly huge and complicated task (as it has to monitor everything you type), which is why it's only the big boys (Word, Pages, Nisus) that have it.

All the best,
Keith

[MimeticMouton]

I picked up a hint years ago from Ioa: add an inline annotation (or coloured text note) at the top of your document before taking the snapshot to make any comments about the version. I've occasionally even copied a synopsis or set of document notes into this if I was going to be rewriting them. Then after taking the snapshot (with title, as Keith recommended), just delete the note.

The Mac version also has an option in the General preferences to take a snapshot of changed documents on each manual save, which might give you some of the "automatic" aspect you're looking for. This wouldn't give you the ability to add a thoughtful title or note to the snapshot, but it's easy enough to have a mix of the program-created snapshots and your own intentional versions.

[nontroppo]

we want a github for prose!

[kathrynloch]

Hi David,

There are no plans in the near future to add anything like track changes, though, as that is an incredibly huge and complicated task (as it has to monitor everything you type), which is why it's only the big boys (Word, Pages, Nisus) that have it.

All the best,
Keith

Awww rats!

Hi I'm a brand new user to Scrivener and I LOVE IT! I'm so fired up with what I can do and I can also see the potential for my editor too. I'm an indie author and my editor is freelance. We've worked together for over 2 years now and have produced about eight novels. She not only does the copy edit, but we work on developmental edits together too. Sometimes the projects can get HUGE with notes and comments flying back and forth in Word with all of my historical research.

In fact, I just broke Word because I had so many notes the comments. I couldn't find anything, I couldn't organize anything and it got so unwieldy that Word had a nervous breakdown. I lost about one third of my research. Thank goodness for backups! But that's why I just downloaded the Scrivener trial. I have been sailing through it for the past three days and am a happy, happy little writer!

Being freelance, my editor also has other clients. She does a lot of work for all of the editing. She has style sheets for the copy edits, and stays consistent with books in a series no matter how far apart they might be. I can see how Scrivener would benefit her with not only me and my soon to be nine novels competed with her, but also for her clients and all of their novels as well. When I send a revision to her, she has to compare/combine documents to see all the changes and - it can be a big headache as the documents get longer and the research more detailed. Having Scrivener's organizational features would make things so much easier - but she needs the track changes for copy editing.

I must say I am surprised. I didn't think it was that big of a deal (sorry but my first thought was of keyloggers that the bad guys use to steal passwords). However my second thought was Open Office Writer and Libre Office which have tracked changes like Word. I figured if the Open Source programs could do it, it wasn't a big deal.

It would be cool - Scrivener would have both authors and editors on board and the freelancers would be an nice chunk of sales.

Ah well maybe someday.

In the meantime I'm going to go play with my new software some more. heehee! Love this stuff! Here I had always heard Scrivener had a heck of a learning curve. But now I'm kicking myself because I didn't try it sooner. The thought process behind the software . . . it makes sense to me - unlike Word.

Oh - one last thing that I have to mention. A long time ago, I was a Rough Draft user and and I loved that little program. In fact, the book I'm working on now was started with that software many, many moons ago. Maybe that's why I "get it", at least in part, with Scrivener.

Thanks for a great program!

Cheers,
Kathryn

[devinganger]

we want a github for prose!

You joke, but I'm really wishing Scriv Mac & Windows had a way to tie into an external source control client. Save the main projects in the local repository folders, save the backups to Dropbox/OneDrive, that's a really great way to safely sync content across multiple computers but still have a good history.

[nontroppo]

Ha, I was only half-joking! I would personally love to have scrivener projects built on a versioned git repository which I could sync via github. Github has thoroughly deserved its almost complete dominance of online version control (Google just closed google code and microsoft is moving huge projects over to github). And there are great free git GUIs for OS X at least.

The problem with most online version control is that they are free for open source projects only, so this is not really an option for many writers, and not something scrivener could really build itself around. Also RTF is not an ideal format for version control, MMD would be much better but there is no way scrivener will drop RTF.

[reepicheep]

Not so sure about Githubbing anything after this press report today. GitHub cleans up after cyber-attack

[devinganger]

I wouldn't use GitHub anyway, as free repositories have to be open to the public there IIRC.

But using the base Git source control technology, so you can attach to ANY Git-powered repository (including GitHub if you want to)? It would be cool. Alas, I think this is a relatively rare use case for the Scriv crowd.

[nontroppo]

There aren't too many private and free git repos unless you want to set up git and host your own server (which I used to do before shunting all my programming over to github).

As I said the other major problem is we'd need a git diff tool that handled RTF files natively too. RTF files are basically text with lots of text markup,but I assume you'd want to see the diff only for the text and not the RTF markup. Some GUI diff tools tools do that, and you can use transformation tools like pandoc to enable text diffs from the commandline (though I don't think pandoc supports RTF, only docx so you may need another tool):

http://blog.martinfenner.org/2014/08/25 ... -with-git/

This is getting into the land of über-geekdom

[devinganger]

I personally don't really care about using repository-side diff tools. i just want a central way to share my files that won't silently break them.

[nom]

I personally don't really care about using repository-side diff tools. i just want a central way to share my files that won't silently break them.

Yeah! Break 'em loud!

Err... on rereading, I think I may have misinterpreted something.