annotation / keeping document structure

[oliver]

Hi,
a handy import/export function that keeps the structure and the notes would be a really important feature to me. So, here some observations and suggestions on this subject:

- keep annotations while exporting it to/ from a WORD processor: If you could transform scrivener notes into footnotes and export the document as an HTML file, WORD could import and export them easily. I realized that footnotes are kept when saving a word document as an HTML file.

- master document/ sub document structure in MS Word could be a convenient strategy for keeping the structure of scrivener documents while exporting them to a word processor and vice versa. The master/ subdocument structure of WORD documents will be kept in an HTML export: In HTML, the subdocuments are shown as links. If you open this HTML file in WORD and go in the master view, these subdocuments can be shown as part of the master file.

- insert/ delete/ edit annotations: Access to the annotation popup window in Scrivener through double clicking would be fine. I would also appreciate a shortcut to quickly delete an annotation without entering the edit window.

- a further suggestion for the annotate/comments feature already included in the "TO DO Before Release" list:
I like scrivener a lot but there's one thing I miss a lot : something like the margin notes functionality of Jer's Novel Writer! This seems to be a good model for maybe redesigning the annotation feature in Scrivener. I mean, why reinventing the wheel ?
Here are the main reasons why I like Jer's approach of margin notes a lot and would be glad if you could realize something similar in scrivener:
1. it's very intuitive and quick: put the cursor anywhere in your text, hit command-M and, voilà, just beside in the margin you'll find your note.
2. it's flexible: the margin is resizeable,
3. you can assign an working status to each note (old note/ change me) - but i would suggest to find better categories than Jer's Novel writer, e.g. rewrite, delete, move, shorten, ...
All in all, the margin notes feature is very near to the paper like process of annotating and reworking a text.

I hope my suggestions make sense ... and help making scrivener even better than it already is.

Best wishes,
Oliver

[KB]

Oliver -

Thank you for your suggestions. Believe it or not, an old incarnation of Scrivener did indeed have margin notes. I spent three months implementing them before deciding against them. If you're interested, there are two example programs contained in the following zip file that show how far I got:

www.rumramruf.com/ScrivenerBeta/MarginTests.zip

As you can see, I had a resizable margin, indicators, drag-and-drop and even the avoidance of overlap (which is still on Jer's "to do" list). Though of course, it is nowhere near as polished as Jer's implementation, as I gave up on it.

Why did I give up on it? Well, lots of reasons, but here are some of the main ones:

1) The margin looks great in Jer's, which has a very clean interface - text and a drawer and nothing else. But Scrivener has a lot of metadata that can be accessed and which must be present in the interface. A margin bang in the middle of the Binder View made it look really cramped. The text seemed squashed over to the right, rather than looking like a nice book-ish column in the centre. So, aesthetics was a big issue.
2) Printing. I could find no graceful way to print margin notes. No matter what I did, when printing, margin notes could get cut across pages. Jer's still has the same issue, I believe.
3) Split views. In Scrivener, you can have the same text document open in multiple places - in an editor window and in the main window, for instance. The text is synchronised automatically. But to introduce a margin into the mix would mean writing a lot of my own synchronisation code, which gets very complicated. Actually, I got quite far with this, but was never 100% happy. (Note that Jer's, as yet, does not allow you to see the same document in two places so does not face this problem.)
4) I check out the competition a lot - not because I want to rip them off (although I will shamelessly copy features I want ), but because my chief reason for creating Scrivener was that none of the competition did quite what I wanted. So I often check out the forums over at Jer's and the Ulysses site, to see if any users have thought of better ways of doing things than I have.While in crisis over my margin notes implementation, I came across this thread on the Ulysses forum:

forum.blue-tec.com/viewtopic.php?t=425#2204

(Actually, I am "KB" on that forum; I was sticking up for margin notes back then because I had just spent 3 months implementing them...) I think AmberV (who hangs around here, too) and others give some very convincing arguments against margin notes.

That said, if you have checked out the notes at the end of Tutorial.scriv, you will know that the current implementation is indeed in for an overhaul, which should offer a balance between the visualisation of Jer's and the unobtrusiveness of Ulysses. You can find more in the following thread:

scrivener.proboards58.com/index.cgi?board=wishlist&action=display&thread=1130105938

These are screenshots from my early experiments in this direction:

Note closed:


Note open:


I expect to start work on this properly over the Christmas holidays, so it won't make it into a beta until late January/February time. After that, I intend to look into converting these notes into footnotes on export.

That said, however, I doubt the sort of structuring/footnote support you are hoping for Word export will come anytime soon, simply because the Word document format is not well documented (because it is Microsoft's proprietary format). You will not find many word processors that allow this level of support - even Mellel and Nisus lose a lot of formatting in their Word (and RTF) export.

Hope that goes some way towards answering you, and I hope you will like the way annotations are heading in Scrivener.

Thanks,
Keith

[amberv]

Footnote translation
What happens when you have an annotation that is "unattached" to any text, say in between paragraphs? Will you have a footnote number in the blank space between paragraphs? Frequently, I have a number of comments at the top of a section, relating to the whole section. Will there be 4 or 5 numbers floating up there all by themselves? What happens to all of the real footnotes (assuming Scrivener eventually supports them)? Will they mingle with the annotations? Be based on a different numbering system?

Editing
Editing notes will be like editing text. If you want to delete it, just select it and hit the delete key. Want to move it? Copy and paste. Edit? Just move the cursor into it and start typing like you would any other sentence.

Margin Note Analogue
The biggest problem with margin notes is that they bring paper's limitations along for the ride. Namely, what if you have a comment that is three or four paragraphs in length? What if there are eight such comments all referencing one sentence? Once squished down into the "margin" these notes are going to become quite tall, extending far out of the relevant area of the section, and so far away from where they are pointing. Adding notes to sections that they are now obscuring, means placing other margin notes even further away -- maybe even into other chapters. What if there are more notes than text in a section? Is the document going to be five "pages" tall for two paragraphs of text and one very tall, skinny set of margin notes? You might say that is an extreme example, but I know of at least two spots in the chapter that I am working on right now that would be so encumbered by a margin note analogous system.

I understand that you can now drag the margin size out in Jer`s to any size. That's great, but now your source text is squished down. If I drag it out to be a width which would allow for bulk annotations in one section, there will be other sections with no annotations where the source text is squished down to 50% of the screen size, for no reason at all.

The system described in the thread [Wish List/Systems for Annotations] addresses the main positive point for margin notes: You can attach the note to a section of text via placement of its pointer. Scrivener's current system also does this, but at the sacrifice of being able to see all of your notes on the page in front of you, at once. The system that will be in Scrivener allows you to place a note anywhere in the stream. It is not paragraph based, but visual based. I suggest you read the thread for a complete description, as it addresses all of your concerns such as dual typal notation: Colour and a text label. So you could very well say "Rewrite", and then colour it blue to mean lower priority. Most importantly, since the notes are in the stream, they can be easily exported. The biggest problem with Jer`s right now is the lack of a real, multi-format margin note export.

Since Nano is basically over. I need to get back to writing out the rest of my ideas for this. I will post some thoughts on export design in that thread.

[KB]

That would be appreciated. As for footnote translation, here are my thoughts: I don't see Scrivener supporting footnotes in any other way any time in the near- or middle-future. Rather, I like the way LyX does this. In Scrivener's implementation, you would be able to label the annotation "button" whatever you liked. Eg. "RWRI" (as in AmberV's example) for "rewrite" and "FN" for "footnote". On export there would be an option such as:

[CHECKBOX] Export annotations as footnotes
[RADIO BUTTON ONE] All annotations
[RADION BUTTON TWO] Annotations labelled: [TEXT FIELD]

So you could select only to export annotations labelled "FN" as footnotes, and all others would be ignored. You could also still export annotations inline, if you wanted, as now.

The biggest problem would be in exporting footnotes in a format that would at all be useful elsewhere. I guess I have to look at LaTeX sometime down the line. But all of this will take research. The actual annotation system itself must come first...

[janra]

LaTeX is a fantastic typesetting program, I recommend at least looking at it :-)

I usually do most of my writing in plain text (when I don't need formatting) and LaTeX (when I do). For fiction, which really has fairly simple formatting requirements, I actually wrote a short script that converts my plain text with super-simple markup into a LaTeX document, so I can print it out in a nice-looking single document. This business of working in RTF all the time is new to me :-)

I wouldn't call myself a LaTeX pro, but I have used it for more than a few documents (including floated inline images, multi-column layouts, and stuff like that beyond the default style) so if you like I can help out with any LaTeX questions. After Dec. 1 :-)

-j

[KB]

I would certainly be very appreciative to you or anyone else who can get me up and running with LaTeX. Myself, I am happy with RTF(D), as I have always used traditional word processors for writing, but I am aware that I will need some sort of LaTeX support to please a lot of users. Trouble is, I need to start somewhere. I have zero clue about LaTeX right now. I've never heard of manuscripts being submitted in anything but .doc or .rtf (electronically), both of which are more than adequate for print-formatting, too... This is why I see it being a 2.0 feature (or a 1.5 feature ) - because it's something that will take a chunk of time just to look at (excuse the bad grammar; it's late on a Sunday night).
Cheers,
Keith

[dunx]

LaTeX tends to pop up as the submission format for scientific journals. I assume that it has lost ground to Word in recent years, but its features for formula layout are (AFAIK) unbeatable.

One easy way into LaTeX is to play with LyX: it's a WYSIWYM text processor, and then do a LaTeX export. I was using it for a wee while for writing in because it (like Scrivener) didn't make me worry about formatting all the time. There's an OS X build of LyX on the website.

www.lyx.org/

[amberv]

There is also a good "crash course" PDF available on the LaTeX website, here: www.latex-project.org/guides. I recommend The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e, in the Contributed Documentation section. It will get you up to speed on the basics, which is all you'll need to build a basic exporter. In a nutshell, it is very similar to HTML exporting in that there are inline and block level commands. They are just wrapped differently. \emph{This will be italics} instead of <em>This will be italics</em>. \begin{document} and \end{document} instead of <body> tags. The 'book' class is probably what you would want to use.

More advanced LaTeX usage would probably not be necessary for a basic exporter. It could be assumed that anyone who would want to use it for more than basic printing would know how to define their own environments and such.

Another interesting class is the 'sffms' class, which exports a submission perfect manuscript. That might be useful for more than just technical users. It is located here: www.ficml.org/sffms

[KB]

Brilliant, thank you for all that.

Dunx - thanks the the link to LyX. In fact I do have a copy of that on my system already, as AmberV recommended it a few weeks ago as something to look at to see how it handles annotations. The new Scrivener annotation system will be a more "Mac-like" implementation of something similar. But I will certainly play with LyX to get a hang of LaTeX.

AmberV - thanks for the links to the tutorials. I will take a look. It sounds like it should be a simple (well, kind of) matter of passing to add tags whenever formatting is found. That said, it will still probably be a 1.5 - 2.0 feature rather than a 1.0 feature, as it will take a lot of work even so.

Thanks again,
Keith

[janra]

sffms?! Hot d**n, I've gotta get that! Computer Modern is a lovely typeface, but publishers want their Courier... :-)