I work in a footnote-heavy discipline. When I insert a footnote in Scrivener, it seems like the footnote is linked to the word that precedes it. That word is very likely to change or get cut on revision, but I’ll still need the footnote. I’ve tried manually selecting the space after a period and anchoring the footnote to that. That solves the revision problem, but when I export to Word, there’s a space between the period and the footnote number.
Is there a way to insert a footnote that is not linked or anchored to any text element at all? A stand-alone footnote?
Hi, yes. Go to Project → Project Settings and in the Formatting pane (I think that’s what it’s called… I’m not on my computer at the moment), you can choose to “use footnote marker”, with an asterisk as default, but you can assign your own marker, including things like [fn].
If you want to change your existing footnotes to the new marker, I think the best way would be to convert them all into inline footnotes, and then convert them back into inspector footnotes. You can select them all in Scrivenings Mode, by selecting one and then Cmd-A; right click (Ctrl-click) will bring a drop-down menu that might bring up the “Convert to inline” command, otherwise it’s somewhere on the Edit menu.
Personally, I’d only do it as and when I wanted/needed to edit any word I’d previously used as a footnote marker.
