Kay Hudson

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.