I have asked this in the Scrivener support forum already but maybe you can give me more advice here:
Scrivener is my main writing program. I collect all types of files, notes, whatever, in my information manager (so far Together, but I’m aiming at, have a guess, DEVONthink) and at some point I export some of the material into a Scrivener project.
Now when I drag content from DEVONthink into a Scrivener project that has its origin in the internet, Scrivener always “understands” the file as a web page.
Say, I use the DEVONthink extension in Safari to create and store a PDF, a paginated PDF or even a plain text Note in DEVONthink. Or I print to PDF to DEVONthink. Then the proper (static) file format is saved in DEVONthink, and the info line above the displayed file holds its URL.
When I drag these files into Scrivener, somehow not the file but only the URL meta data is dragged and Scrivener opens the web page with that address.
Is there a way to change this behaviour? And on which side have the changes to be made?
From Together I can drag and drop without problem, only the URL (and other) meta data is lost in the process. It would be perfect if the URLs automatically become document URLs in Scrivener but the most important thing is that the—static i. e. consistent!—content does not get lost.
Dragging PDFs into Scrivener (2.0.2) works fine here. Perhaps if you created a small Scrivener file with an example of what’s happening and sent it to Support at Literature and Latte they could help you. This doesn’t appear to a problem that’s fixable on the DT side.
Are you absolutely sure it works? A PDF from a web page can easily be mistaken for the page itself. Actually this happened to me, that’s why I noticed this really serious problem so late.
I just created a paginated PDF from this very forum page with the Safari extension and stored it in DEVONthink. The PDF looks different to the web page, first of all there is no green background.
When I drag the PDF into Scrivener, after a short while (indicating a connection to the internet) the page is displayed—the page, in full green colour, not the PDF. And this does really not happen when you do this? (I use the latest versions of both DEVONthink and Scrivener by the way.)
I think there may be a workaround to only getting url References in the Inspector window of Scrivener: I drag the pdf to the file in the Binder to which I wish to attach it - the pdf is converted into Scrivener-friendly text file. Then I Lock the file to which I wish to drag the attached pdf, select the new text file and drag it to the Reference window in Inspector. Then I delete the text file from the Binder.
But is there a better way than all this? In particular, is there a way to reference the pdf file in DTPRO within Scrivener? What is the simplest/fastest way of creating the link? Copy Item Link in DTPRO and paste this into Scrivener?
A little update from my side: The aforementioned behaviour of a DEVONthink PDF from web dragged into Scrivener turning into an url does only affect SINGLE PDF files.
When you drag more than one at once they will all appear as PDFs as they should. I don’t know why, but it is good to know about this behaviour.
They don’t take their url with them and put it into the url field in Scrivener’s inspector, though.