You might be thinking to yourself, what’s the big deal, they look about the same! For one thing, there was never a problem with where and how we used project notes. Anchoring the redesign around those parts of it that worked well, like them being easily accessible in the inspector at all times, was something we considered essential to the redesign of the feature. Secondly, despite appearances, what you’re looking at represents an entirely different way of thinking about global notes in your project.

Those veterans out there might notice the first clue along the very top: we aren’t looking at the notes tab, we’re looking at the references tab.[2] As with project notes, references have been a part of Scrivener’s design since the very first version: a simple list in the inspector where you can drop things in from the binder, making them more accessible. You could even link to files on your computer or sites on the Web. None of that has changed, but a few simple additions to the references concept made it possible to do an unlikely thing with them: merge project notes with references and create what will be known going forward as Bookmarks:

The list has been cleaned up, and now titles are simply titles. In fact if you change the name of a bookmark in this pane, the original binder item changes too.

Next, and most crucially, we added an editor below the list. Click on a bookmark in the upper half, the binder file opens up in the editor below. (And yes, if you’re wondering, this works for stuff that isn’t text as well, like pictures.)

Everything you use references for right now is still there. You can load these items into the main editors instead of the sidebar, or as Quick Reference panels.

As with before, documents have their own lists as well. We’re looking at the project bookmark list here because that’s the focus of this article, but you can just as easily reference those bookmarks important to individual documents from this same pane. When you create a hyperlink from one section to another, you still get a back-reference, establishing a circular connection between the two items.

You can’t see it here, but we beefed up the contextual menu as well, providing more utility functions for bookmarks within the project, to files on your disk or URLs to elsewhere.

As my usage of this area of the project grew, I found my concept of “project notes” grew likewise. Instead of having my notes confined to those sorts of things that can be confined, I was throwing all kinds of files into this list. I often bookmark the chapter I am working on so I can easily get back to it when I go off on a tangent, or the appendix I frequently cross-reference and even my document templates folder so that I can quickly view and modify my templates. Project notes are no longer about having a few little scratch notes in a small cluster I usually forget to look at, they are the most important parts of my project, and where they are dedicated purely to notes, I can organise these directly into the binder among other files they relate to.

A Bookmark Browser

That’s about it for the inspector, but that’s not all project notes were about. While the inspector is convenient, sometimes it is even more convenient to have your notes in a separate window. We needed a good way to provide that same capability and maybe take it to the next level as well, without adding more features and bloat. The answer, like many things, proved simple: use what you’ve already got. In this case, Quick Reference panels became the obvious choice.[3] They are already capable of editing and viewing binder items—the only thing missing was a way of easily browsing through bookmarks.