Converting inspector comments to inline annotations and vice versa is supposed to be a lossless operation, isn’t it?
I’ve noticed that after a few conversions I end up with text like this in my manuscript: “(linked comment)”
It does not happen all the time, so I’ve not been able to reproduce it at will.
Am I doing something wrong by using that conversion over and over?
If there’s no adjacent text that the linked comment can be attached to, Scrivener inserts the “linked comment” text to provide an anchor, so that the annotation isn’t lost during conversion.
Excuse me, Jennifer, but I don’t quite get it yet. How do I prevent this from happening? How do I make sure that I have an anchor before a conversion?
Suppose that sentence A with, let’s say, 10 words, has an inline annotation inside just between words 5 and 6.
If I convert inline annotations to inspector comments and then do the opposite conversion, shouldn’t sentence A remain exactly as it was originally?
And should not the same conversion sequence produce the same neutral results with footnotes too?
My fault, I didn’t understand earlier what you were describing. There are legitimate cases where the “Linked Comment” text is added to prevent the annotation just floating off, and I thought you were just asking about how that came about. I see the bug you’re talking about with the repeat conversions–it’s like Scrivener is still seeing the previous text as linked, so it’s adding the new “Linked Comment” text to avoid overwriting a non-existent comment. If you close the project and reopen before you run the conversion again, it seems to work correctly.
As per 1.7.2 release notes this bug is listed as fixed, but still happening:
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/1-7-2-0-released-2nd-july-2014/27083/1
* Fixed a bug where repeatedly converting between inline and inspector notes could insert “Linked Comment” anchor text unnecessarily.
Thanks. Looks like it’s working for comments/annotations but not for footnotes.
In my case it failed with comments and annotations. I’ve not tried it yet with footnotes 
In that case, could you give specific reproduction steps for the annotations and comments problem?