Workarounds for tracking changes effectively in Scrivener?

February 27, 2014 8:58 AM

I'm a playwright in rehearsals for production of a new script. I wrote it in Scrivener, and am in love with the program except for its lack of effective change-tracking features. Ideally, I'd love to find a way to generate reports on a daily-or-so basis of the changes made to individual lines that I could email out to the whole creative team.

I've done a little googling around. The "snapshot" feature doesn't seem to more than allow you to compare two versions side-by-side. I could export to Word and track changes in there, but that seems counterproductive. Scrivener also allows for writing new text in different colors for each revision, but that doesn't show deletions and seems primitive.

Any other ideas for how to easily track changes, other than ponying up for Final Draft?

posted by HeroZero to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Well….I came in here to say Final Draft. Sorry. It's expensive and can be annoying, but it handles revisions really well.
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:14 AM on February 27, 2014

Best answer: Have you asked on their forum? They are super responsive and there's a handful of powerusers who hang around there too.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:31 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Somehow, my googling had never brought me to the forums! Thanks. Per the head developer:

Track changes is pretty much never coming to Scrivener, as has been discussed amply before.

Scrivener is conceived, apparently, as first draft software -- hence the need for Final Draft. Hmph.
posted by HeroZero at 10:34 AM on February 27, 2014

You could store every exported script in a system that DOES track changes across text documents, like git. Do an export from Scrivener and throw that export into a git-controlled folder, replacing the prior one. Github will give you changes from one to the other over the document's history. It's a bit techie, but would work.
posted by griffey at 11:03 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

My experience with Final Draft has always been that it's not difficult to "locate" a copy online.
posted by drjimmy11 at 2:47 PM on February 27, 2014

Response by poster: Griffey: I've heard that, but I actually had difficulty "locating" Final Draft, or at least a well-cracked copy. I don't have a lot of experience torrenting.

I've ended up just using the Scrivener snapshots feature: I do a "compare," copy and paste the changed bits in Word and then into an email to my cast to preserve the change-highlighting formatting. Then I'll export PDFs of individual scenes as needed and write in the page numbers using the Adobe PDF annotations feature. That's my workaround, I guess.
posted by HeroZero at 5:54 AM on March 18, 2014