Can this endnote issue be solved?

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I purchased the Windows version to be released Nov 7. In the meantime I am using the Windows version that expires in Dec.

My question… I am using the Non-fiction template and want endnotes for each chapter. Under Draft I have it set up like this:

Title
Introduction
Chap 1
Endnotes
Chap 2
Endnotes
Chap 3
Endnotes
… etc

The problem… the numbered “footnotes” only show up as endnotes in Chap 1 no matter what chapter they are from. In the endnotes for Chaps 2 & 3 all you see is this notice: [Any footnotes you created in your paper will get inserted here upon Compile (this purple bubble will be removed automatically)… after PDF compile.

I want endnotes for each chapter on a separate page following the chapter text. Any way to do this???

Thank you.

2

There’s not a way to do this directly in Scrivener, no, as it requires advanced page-layout to group endnotes that way for PDF. You can export to RTF and then fix them up the way you want in a word processor that provides more page-layout options and save as a PDF from there. The “Endnotes” document will only work to gather all the notes, so you can delete the extra copies of that from your binder as well and just move the copy you’re keeping to wherever you want to have the endnotes temporarily in your compiled version, or if you want those pages to be in your compiled doc as placeholders for where you’ll organize the notes in the word processor, you can delete the text that’s in there now so it will just be blank. You could also delete them entirely and just compile as footnotes or endnotes without it, since you’ll be rearranging after export.

3

Thank you. This was helpful and saved me a lot of time.

I have reset to doing only one endnote and compiled to RTF and viewed it in Word 2007.

However, it shows up as i, ii, iii instead of the superscript 1, 2, 3 as shown in Scrivener… I would expect Scrivener to control this… any suggestion?.. a big job to convert manually in RTF.

ALSO… I tried to see how this would look in Kindle format (mobi) and set everything up as per instructions. I was unable to generate a Kindle file. Click the Compile button and nothing appears to happen… nothing generated.

It would be great to create one master research/writing file with Scrivener, then generate different formats without having to manually change each one. Not sure if this is possible… what do you think?

4

You should be able to set what kind of endnote formatting you want in Word–I don’t have a copy of 2007, but I think this is in the References ribbon, you should be able to click on “Footnotes” (or maybe “Endnotes”) and then get some options. We’ll be adding further options for footnote and endnote formatting to Scrivener, but at present it’s not possible to choose the numbering scheme.

To compile for .mobi or .epub, you need to ensure that the title, author, and date fields of the “Meta-Data” pane in the Compile sheet are filled out. There should be a message that pops up explaining this, but that got mysteriously silenced in 049–it’s been fixed for 1.0. If you don’t see all the options in compile, click the blue arrow button to the right of the “Format As” list. “Meta-Data” will be in the list on the left.

However, there’s a bug currently being fixed where the footnotes won’t compile properly on the e-book formats, along with a handful of other e-book related compile bugs, so you might not want to spend too much time messing with this for now, since it may prove more frustrating than it’s worth. When 1.0 is available next week, this will be fixed up so you’ll be able to really do something with this.

This is in fact the goal and philosophy of Scrivener. Mostly what you should need to change for generating to different formats is just the compile settings, and you can save those as presets so that you once you’ve set it the way you like it you can reload it again later. There will be cases sometimes that might necessitate moving a few things around in the binder or switching the “include in compile” status of an item, but as Scrivener’s compiler gains even more power with additional features, this will lessen.

5

Not only am I impressed by Scrivener, I am really impressed by this quality of support. Thank you for all the quick, helpful information.

Other than the things I have mentioned about foot/endnotes, Scrivener exceeds my expectations. I’ll do my very best to try to be patient until 1.0 becomes available next week. 8)

6

Happy to oblige. :slight_smile: Thank you for your purchase!

7

Sorry to revisit this before version 1.0 is released, but I have spent my second day with Scrivener and am concerned about it’s usefulness to write non-fiction books. I think I have filtered my question down to just this basic one:

Will 1.0 be able to compile endnotes for each chapter, or by chapter, at the end of a chapter or at the end of the book?

From your previous comment, I’m assuming that we cannot have just the endnotes for each chapter. That is, Chap 1 might have notes 1-8, Chap 2 might have notes 1-14, chapter 3 might have notes 1-4 and so forth. This is the ideal. I looked at a couple dozen modern non-fiction books today and this is far and away the preferred way of documenting endnotes… by chapter, each note staring at 1 for each chapter.

The next best way of doing it is having everything in one big endnote at the end of the book. But here it is essential to be able to have notes sorted by chapter, and each chapter starting with number 1 and following. You almost never find a modern non-fiction books that has 125 endnotes (for example)at the back in a long list where the chapter where the note appeared is ignored. Academic papers may have a long undifferentiated list of footnotes/endnotes, but non-fiction trade books must have more order.

Of course, this can be manipulated in Word, but what’s the point? I’ve been using Word for many years and am looking for something more efficient.

Also, properly sorted and formatted endnotes are essential when you directly compile an ebook. It is a major pain to go into that code to try to properly format endnotes in the various ebook formats. Yes, people are still using footnotes for academic writing, but properly formatted endnotes are essential for non-fiction trade books.

Did I get my hopes up for nothing? :blush: Or will Scrivener take the pain out of handling sources without all the manual work I’m already doing in Word? So many wonderful things about Scrivener, but without being able to handle endnotes on a chapter by chapter basis (either after each chapter or at the end of the book), then I see no real gain in using it. Your thoughts?

Thank you.

8

I’m going to chip in here, though I’m nothing to do with L&L, just a long term Scrivener on Mac user.

I would imagine you can solve your problem — not that it’s one that affects me — by compiling your chapters separately as then the endnotes would appear at the end of each chapter-compile, and should be numbered 1–n in relation to that chapter. When you have compiled all the chapters, you could then pull them all together into a single document using your word-processor of choice.

Now, I don’t know if it would be best to set about that by making each chapter a folder at the level of draft and then moving into the “Draft” folder, or whatever it’s called on your system, for compilation, as only the contents of the draft folder are compiled — ctrl-opt-arrow keys are your friends here … I assume those are the shortcuts on Windows — or whether you can keep each chapter as a daughter of Draft and then just select each in turn in the “Contents” part of the compile sheet.

As is often the case with Scrivener, most things can be done as it is extremely flexible, but you have to think outside the normal “word-processor box”.

HTH
Mark

9

Scrivener is all about the forty pages in the chapter, not whether or not the chapter has flawless ready-to-print layout done to it. It’s a tool for writing those chapters from scratch, and managing the massive amount of work that goes into the construction of these chapters, not only the words themselves, but the constellation of supporting data and ancillary material required to make that chapter as accurate and easy to write as possible. It’s about elevating the raw mechanics of writing in an orthogonal fashion to how most word processors work and alleviating the fractured workflows we’ve had to put up with by working in linear document designed applications.

It is not, and probably never will be, a typesetting engine.

I think you do know this one fact, but it is worth reiterating: these endnotes, just because they aren’t placed the way you need them after hitting the compile button, they really are endnotes. That means you can take them into any program and format them however you please later on. They aren’t static text in most cases that you’re stuck with. Like I say I think you get that, because of the follow statement:

That’s exactly the point. Scrivener would cease to be more efficient to use if it was Word and/or InDesign and Scrivener. It would be a monolithic beast that could hardly even lift its own interface. Software cannot reasonably be all things, at least not in this generation of computing. Maybe some day it will be possible to have a supremely elegant drafting tool with a supremely elegant typesetting engine. Maybe it will even be possible for one developer to pull that off, too. Doubtful, but maybe.

Anyway, in this particular world, you’ve got to make choices, and selecting a tool that focusses on a particular aspect of a job can often be more beneficial than trying to pack every conceivable feature into a tool and never straying from it as you transition from one phase of the project to the next.

That all said, Scrivener does have a lot. It’s no slouch when it comes to producing a compile copy. Stack it up against many other dedicated writing programs and you’ll see this to be true, even in its formative state right now, and there is so much more planned and designed in these regards; hundreds already designed. So it can do a lot, and it will be doing a whole lot more as time goes by—but especially for non-fiction, expecting it to do everything Word does just isn’t realistic.

And if that is what you are looking for, something that can replace Word or another desktop publishing program entirely, this probably isn’t the best software for the job. If formatting endnotes in the same software you use to spend a year or two writing the raw material is that important—it’s the wrong tree.

E-books are a trickier matter. This is a brand new field that a lot of us are just now getting in to, and like all brand new fields, the tools for making e-books are still young. Even the venerable old tools that can format a document every other way you can imagine are still lacking in all that could be done for this. We’ve got a lot planned for e-books, but right now for complicated tasks, you still can’t do it all. Organising endnotes by sections in e-books is in fact something on the sooner-than-later list.

10

Maybe I should change my wording:

As is often the case with Scrivener, most things can be achieved as it is extremely flexible, but you have to think outside the normal “word-processor box” to achieve such detailed final outputs.

:slight_smile:

Mark

11

Thank you both for your observations.

Yes, xiamenese, as you say, “you could then pull them all together into a single document using your word-processor of choice” but I think that’s the problem, not the solution. Word has the flexibility, so why use Scrivener? Certainly Scrivener has good integration for most everything, but if you need another software product for output, then that’s a worry.

It’s a bigger worry than usual with ebooks because not only do you need Word to create one with modern endnote standards, but you also need programming skills for multiple ebook formats. Currently I write in Word and create eBooks in InDesign… adding Scrivener to the mix is problematic… when it need not be if Scrivener could format endnotes to a modern standard.

AmberV, I appreciated your essay in defense of Scrivener. No need, however, since I already think Scrivener is way cool. We agree it is awesome for input, but you seem to need other software, like Word, for some pretty standard output types. Bummer.

I don’t even think Scrivener needs to be a “monolithic beast” as you say. After all, it already outputs some pretty specific types of documents–like theses, fiction, scripts and academic style footnotes–all in print and ebooks. That’s good, but why leave out something huge like chapter-based endnotes, which is the modern method of “footnoting” commercial non-fiction?

I, for one, would use Scrivener and no other programs if I could find a way to get the output I needed without reformatting Scrivener output in Word or having to reformat Scrivener output in HTML and other specialized scripting that the various eBooks use. I know for sure that the various eBook compilers are simple if you just format your text and notes correctly before you run their compiler. My wish is that Scrivener could output things so that post-compiling fiddling around is not needed.

Make no mistake–I think Scrivener is fantastic. I would use it exclusively if I could. But its inability to do undifferentiated endnotes is a major flaw for people who make a living writing non-fiction books. And there are probably a lot more people who do that than who write BBC Radio scripts, where the output is beautiful in Scrivener. So, it would not seem that chapter based endnotes would be out of the question when you already have some exotic outputs.

Also, I am open to work-arounds that keep me in Scrivener to create chapter-based endotes (either after each chapter or by chapter at the end of the book-- numbered 1-n by chapter) and don’t require that I use other software. Any suggestions about possible work-arounds will be appreciated.

12

This is a short reply as I’m not really here (ha!) but I did just want to throw in there, which I think AmberV already did, that the ability to compile notes by section for ebook output is on the roadmap, probably sooner than later.

13

How modern are we talking about? I would imagine with e-books you mean really modern, but e-books do away with the necessity and constraints of using numbers or tidying lists into sections at all. These conventions are, like the index, tools for static piles of paper with no hyperlinking, search engine, or dynamic layout capability. :slight_smile:

Again, if we’re just talking about e-books, then this is already on the sooner-than-later list. For a program that is in feature freeze and polishing stages, I’m not sure what more I can say.

These are two totally different things, though. A script format can be put together in an hour or less. It’s just a bunch of metrics in a settings dialogue. Adding sectional endnotes to the word processor compile formats is a major undertaking. It would require overhauling several fundamental mechanisms to the internal structure of the RTF in order to produce the notion of “sections” at all. We have to budget out development efforts of that magnitude because they consume whole quarters of years to accomplish. For a feature that can be accomplished with 15 minutes or so of post-processing in Word—a task that nearly all non-fiction writers using Scrivener are going to have to do for one reason or another anyway. Really only those working in fields where they don’t have to design their own documents can get away with using a drafting tool 100%. A designer might use all kinds of tools to get the rudiments of their project done; but ultimately they are probably going to end up in Photoshop or Illustrator for the final synthesis. Switching tools at various points in the total project to get the maximum quality out of your work is not, in my opinion, an unreasonable suggestion.

Especially when one is going to be, on average, spending many months if not years in Scrivener doing the bulk of the creative work—and what we are talking about here is essentially non-existent in terms of total time. An hour or two of touch-up in Word after 18 months of writing? How can that possibly be a deal breaker? I do hear what you are saying, it would be nice to just throw Word in the rubbish bin for good, some can if they don’t have to design their work, but I don’t know—I guess I don’t see how such a small and minor task at the very bottom of such a large undertaking is really that big of a dent in the feature set of Scrivener.

14

Thank you for this. You give me hope. :smiley:

It worries me that others don’t see that output is as important input, but there you have it. You spend time writing with Scrivener, then have to use other products to get it into a marketable format, especially if you’re writing trade non-fiction. I’ve been making my living as a writer for many decades, and I’ll never understand why anyone would think that’s okay. It is far more than spending a couple hours at the end of a project. When you start manipulating footnotes/endnotes manually all sorts of mayhem can result. Been there, done that.

Scrivener is obviously a superior writing management system. It offers tremendous advantages in gathering data, accessing it and embedding references. It makes the entire writing process more efficient. But it’s running on 3 wheels without being more flexible in organizing footnotes/endsnotes for print AND ebook formats. But I think I already made that point a time or two. :neutral_face: I will be hopeful, MimeticMouton, that things like this will be addressed soon. Thank you for your positive response. I’ll give it a rest now. :smiley:

15

But we already have programs that offer complete layout systems.

The existence and success of Scrivener are proof that many many people – including many successful professional writers – find such capabilities either unnecessary or actively intrusive during the creative part of the writing process.

In fact, there almost seems to be an inverse relationship: the better the layout engine, the worse the product is as a compositional tool. Many people (myself among them) have become more and more disillusioned with Word as its layout capabilities have become more powerful.

Trade non-fiction is almost my entire business, and I haven’t found Scrivener’s limitations onerous. My own solution to the endnote problem is simply to create the endnotes as a sub-document (or group of documents) within the chapter. shrug Works for me, and with far less pain and suffering than I endure anytime I have to open Word.

Katherine

16

I too am looking for how to do numbered Chapter endnotes. Katherine can I ask if you mean that you solve the problem completely manually? and dont use the endnote function at all? (I use the Windows version)