Scrivener is an ideal writing platform for more than just books and screenplays! You can put research notes, or comments that some in your audience require, but others do not. Let’s assume you are working on a paper to submit, or a report.
This is very useful, and brings me to a novel use for these sidebar comments. When you compile your manuscript into pdf, ebook, word doc or whatever the compiler allows you to include or exclude comments. It’s unlikely that phrase is going to appear in the manuscript text, so I can then use the Scrivener search tool to search for “TO_DO:” and bingo! I have all my todo items collected together and can work through the manuscript to address them.Īs you work through your comments you can delete them. If you notice I prefixed my comment with the phrase: TO_DO: There’s no option to “View all Comments” which would be nice. The notes appear based on the document section you are in at the time. Note: I’m frequently extolling Scrivener in this blog but I will make a minor criticism here. In fact if your editor used Microsoft Word and leaves comments they will import into Scrivener just fine, and appear as sidebar comments too. Your editor can leave you sidebar comments attached to text that needs further attention – much like you can in Microsoft Word. This commenting capability is particularly useful if your editor also uses Scrivener. I use red for awkward phrases, yellow for to-do items, orange if I feel something needs embellishment. If you right click on the comment in the sidebar you can even change its color, allowing you to create different note types for yourself and easily distinguish what they are for. Clicking the note in the sidebar jumps me to the section of the manuscript to which this comment belongs. What’s really cool here is as I scroll the manuscript, the notes stay visible in the sidebar – prompting me that I have a to-do item in this section of the book. Collapsing them allows you to see most of them on your screen and you can expand the ones you are interested in. Useful when you have a ton of comments or long comments. You can use this to hide the comment text or expand it. Note: You will notice on the sidebar comment an arrow next to the heading “comment:”. Now I can hover my mouse over the text in the manuscript and see the comment, or I can read it in the sidebar. Notice how the text in the manuscript becomes highlighted but the note remains in the sidebar. I can then type as much text here as I want. This generates a comment for me – automatically adding the date and time the note was entered.
Next – from the inspector “comments & Footnotes” panel I hit the plus “+” button.First I highlight the text to which I want to attach the note, in this case “scar tissue”.I want to remind myself here that I need to let the reader know how he got that scar. I’ve mentioned here that Aldivon has a scar across his neck. In the screen shot below you will see a paragraph from my novel “To Raise a King”. This is the comments and footnotes panel. The last icon on the inspector panel resembles a speech bubble with a “n.” in it. You can toggle it by pressing the large “I” in the blue circle top right of the main menu.
If you’ve read my previous blogs you’ll be familiar with the inspector – but for those of you not sure how to bring it up or what it is – the inspector is the “toolbox” on the right of the scrivener workspace. So how do we add notes, comments and footnotes to our projects?īack to our helpful inspector again. That said I do use inline comments for glaring issues in the manuscript. I personally favor the sidebar comments as they are always visible reminders and don’t scroll out of view when reading the text. You don’t have to use all of these methods. Why this is useful we’ll discuss shortly – first let’s take a look at each of the options available to writers when it comes to jotting down notes, to-do items, and comments.įirst thing to note is this. Scrivener has quite an ingenious method of allowing you to leave notes to yourself or others in your document, and magically suppress them when printing. In this post I talk about comments and footnotes. Sorry for the delay in posting the next set of tips, but I’ve been busy on a couple of writing projects.