I’m editing a long doctoral thesis into two different books. Scrivener’s binder is good at organizing into Book>Chapter>Sub Chapter, etc. I am using the status and Labels to guide where I am in the editing process (draft, edited, needs footnote work, etc.). What would be most helpful is if I could figure out a way to use custom metadata within the editor itself for certain passages within text files.
So, if I have a text file (subchapter) that has 10 paragraphs and I want to highlight two (2) of them to be included in the first book one, and one (1) paragraph to be included in book two; is there a way to highlight those text items in the editor and mark only those with a label? Then, when I selected the metadata label, only those text passages, from across multiple text files, would show up?
I have read and reread the help manual and get the feeling that Scrivener will only do this according to a text file or folder.
What I’d do, is to split the document in shorter chunks, so that the paragraphs that should be included in respective book are separate documents to which I can add any metadata. I’d still be able to read them as a integrated text in Scrivenings. If I want to signal in the Binder and Outline that all the resulting text chunks belong to a certain “subchapter”, I can keep them together by keeping the beginning paragraphs as a document with the following paragraphs as subdocuments.
I do realize that I can break out the text into smaller text files, but that would defeat the point of using metadata on text blocks. Another example, both books are about a similar subject (since they are taken from the same dissertation) and therefore will contain some cross-references. So, some paragraphs may have metadata directed to each book.
Splitting the text in smaller text blocks would enable you to use metadata down to the paragraph level. How do you mean that would defeat doing exactly that?
You could simply attach e.g. tags for book1 and/or book2 to any text block that way.
While I myself am in the group of people that have no qualms breaking down chunks of text to whatever size they need to be (I do drawn the line at paragraphs, though the way I work doesn’t specifically limit me to that even with Scrivener’s built-in limitation of each section being on its own line at the least, since Markdown will combine adjacent lines)—there are still many occasions where I find that the reason for marking a particular piece of text is not aligned with the reason for breaking a chunk of larger text into two or more pieces.
As such I have several approaches that work toward making finer-detailed “metadata” markings in my text. I describe some of them briefly in this recent post, which also contains a list of links to threads with more commentary and explanation into the background for why I work this way—and how Scrivener is very adept at supporting this way of working.
Amber,
Thanks for the reply, in lew of any future in-line tagging, your manual tagging method may work for my needs. Have you come across a way to view all search results in a separate view? That is, if I search for “B2:3” (Book Two, Chapter 3) the cursor is placed at each location with that code. What if I wanted to see all results in a virtual text document much like a virtual Scrivening, is that possible? This would give the ability to edit the order of large portions of text without having to cut and copy into a new “static” text file.
If you are searching for this “tag” in your text via Project Search, then you are given a list of all the items that contain that tag in the sidebar. If you click the little hook arrow button in the binder header bar then it will load the search results into the editor, where you can switch on Scrivenings—and now you know how to turn a search into a “document”. If you press ⌘G then you will jump from one search match to the next in that session. If you save the search into a saved search collection for future use, then you don’t even have to set up the search a second time, you just click on the tab, hook button and off you go.
