Advice about footnotes and word count

Scrivener
1

Hi All,

I am a new Scrivener use working on a PhD. I need to make a decision about footnotes and I was hoping to get some advice. One of my concerns is that I would prefer for footnotes to be excluded from the ‘View / Edit Scrivenings’ word count. My preference would be, of course, to use the inline footnote capacity but 1) My footnotes can be quite long 2) I am concerned about keeping things clean for multmarkdown support and 3) I want them excluded from the word count. I am considering keeping the footnotes in ‘Document notes’ using multimarkdown formatting and then including them on render. Can anyone think of any downsides to this?

My other option would be to keep the mmd footnotes for each chapter in a separate folder and then exclude this when entering the Edit Scrivenings mode. The trouble here is that I’m nervous about so much interface distance between the writing and the relevant notes creating chaos.

I am not using any kind of bib management software because none quite meet my needs – some of my notes refer to archival material with long quotes and others are just regular book/article references or lists / sub-discussion of references. Also, may be useful to note that I eventually want end notes at the end of each chapter (as opposed to footnotes on every page.

Any advice or experience with these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rebecca

2

Alternatively, you could use the Project Statistics function, which has an option to exclude footnotes from the count, for a more accurate word count, and just rely on the footer bar for an approximation (which is a good practice to get used to anyway because it doesn’t exclude other elements that might not be a part of the Draft either). This strikes me as being quite a bit easier than off-storing everything and having to bounce around between excluded and included E.S. and so forth. I think that will just get tremendously annoying after a few hundred pages, but your tolerance for it might be higher than mine. :slight_smile:

My advice, go ahead and use inline footnotes. They might get in your way for a bit, but 2.0 will be out soon, and it will have an additional footnote feature for people who don’t like inline writing, that lets you sidebar them. You’ll be able to convert them from inline to sidebar notes when you upgrade.

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Oooo! enthralled stare Shiny!

4

Thanks very much for the additional information. I am going to go ahead with inline footnotes and see how it goes.
Rebecca