This afternoon when I was cleaning out my email (a never ending task), I ran across one I had marked to save because it had several links to web sites I was interested in reading. Rather than bury the list in my inbox, I thought I’d start a file for the topic, and rather than open yet another Word document, I opened a new text item in the Research folder of my Scrivener Miscellany project, where I stash blog posts and book reviews. I had downloaded and saved a PDF file from one site, and I pasted the addresses of the other three sites into my new document. And that’s all I had—addresses, not links.
Being inherently lazy, I wanted links, not addresses that I’d have to cut and paste (again) into my browser. I knew this was possible in Scrivener, but I didn’t know how to do it. I tried right-clicking on an URL; that brought up a menu of formatting options, including “Scrivener link,” but I didn’t want to connect to anything within my Scrivener project. I wanted the outside world, or at least my computer files and on line sites.
So I went poking through menus and found what I wanted under Edit/Link. That brought up this little box:
When I cut and pasted the URL I wanted to save into the box and hit “okay,” I had my working link.
To link to the PDF file I had saved to my computer, I opened the link box, changed the source to “file” and dragged the file name into it.
Now I can build my own catalog of references, each accessible with a click of my mouse.
The latest update of Scrivener for Windows was released last month. I printed out the Refinements and Changes notes, but I haven’t begun to scratch the surface. Scrivener Ace Gwen Hernandez has posted an overview of the new release here, along with scads of useful information on the program.
Jul 19, 2014 @ 10:01:45
There is a public online community with over 2800 members for Scrivener Users. I’ve recently added a link to an article and video by Michael Jecks who writes the Knights Templar series on how he uses Scrivener to this community.
The link to the community is:
https://plus.google.com/communities/109597039874015233580
Because the community is public anyone on the internet can view the content without needing to be a community member and without needing a Google Plus account.
Gwen Hernandez is one of the members of our Scrivener Users community.
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Sep 26, 2015 @ 20:05:04
The Edit/Link feature does not seem to work while editing a footnote. However, I found that if I created the link in the editor, and then copied and pasted it into a footnote, I got a real link. I’m just learning Scrivener and am in the tutorial, so I don’t know how this will show up in the final content, but I have seen such links within footnotes in the Scrivener manual (PDF output format) so it must be possible.
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Sep 26, 2015 @ 20:15:46
Lou, I write fiction, so I haven’t tried anything with footnotes. Sounds like you’re doing academic writing–best of luck with it!
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