I am using the Scrivener free trial for now. I primarily use my Word processing software to write academic (often law) articles, and they require a large number of footnotes. I often want to share drafts before they are done, and will have some unfinished footnotes that I want to completely hide upon compile, or else hide parts of. I have found a way to hide parts of the main text (by creating a special style that I then omit from the compile), but I can’t get it to apply to footnotes (see below). So I have several questions relating to footnote mechanics:
Is there a way to apply styles to footnotes?
Is there a way to hide certain footnotes when compiling? I know how to hide them all—I want to be able to selectively hide just the ones I choose. I tried to apply my “hidden” style to the text to which a footnote I want to hide is anchored, but that hides the text without hiding the footnote; in the compiled doc, it leaves the actual footnote number there, just floating, without the attached text.
Is there any way to apply labels to footnotes, as one can to comments?
Is there any way to see just footnotes in the inspector temporarily, and not mixed in with comments?
Thanks for any thoughts! I’m really hoping that I can find some way to make serious footnote editing manageable on Scrivener; it has so many other great features. I’m trying to switch over from Ulysses, largely because of the difficulties I had there with footnotes.
Basically, you have four note streams: inline annotations, inline footnotes, inspector comments and inspector footnotes. Any of them can be excluded at compile time, so I would work out which of the streams would suit you best for hiding.
Personally, I’d use one of the annotation/comment streams.
Thanks—yes, I have seen those options. But I don’t like crowded workspaces, so I’d rather not use inline annotations and footnotes; I just want to use inspector footnotes. Is there a way to hide some but not others of the inspector footnotes? And can I add styles within those footnotes?
As for styling footnotes, I know you can select them and apply “use default formatting“. I’ve not tried applying a style. I’m not at my computer at the moment to experiment, but you could try single clicking a footnote (so that the footnote is selected, but the cursor is not active in the footnote) and then trying to apply your style, either from the menu or using a shortcut if you’ve set one.
When I’m back at my computer’ I’ll try some experimenting if the above doesn’t solve it.
Thanks. Yes, I have tried clicking the footnote or selecting text within the footnote, and then either clicking the desired style in the style menu or right-clicking—but no luck. I can change the color of the text, or the highlighting, but that does not amount to a style. I tried then changing the compile settings to exclude text of a certain color, but that didn’t seem possible (unless, again, the color was part of a style). Maybe I somehow missed it?
Footnotes are not part of the Style system, and this was at least a feature request from me when Scrivener 3 was in beta IIRC.
They are amenable to replacements, so you could use something like ««My footnote»» and the replacement will do a regex replace to remove the text. this means you don’t have the footnote content, but at least for multimarkdown output, you still get the empty footnote as markup. here is a simple regex to match and then remove these:
These could easily be removed by a script or Lua filter for markdown workflows, but perhaps they are also not present in whatever you are compiling to?
I’d go for the route @xiamenese suggested. If you use Inspector footnotes for public content and Inspector Comments for private (or not yet public) content, you could easily exclude the latter from Compile. And switching from an Inspector Footnote to an Inspector Comment or vice versa is just a right-click on the footnote/comment away.
And yes to @nontroppo, footnotes should be part of the style system.
I too wish that Footnotes had access to the style system. Currently, on compiling they are styled “Normal”, at least for RTF and NWP (can’t say for DOCX), where there is a specific “Footnote” style which is overridden by “Normal”. It’s easy enough to sort out, but it would be even easier if one didn’t have to.
If @macrospect is already using comments as well as footnotes, and doesn’t want to have obtrusive stretches of inline text, a further thought is that that text could be put in a separate document, with “Include in compile” unset, linked to a minimal anchor so it can be opened in the second split/copyholder/QR-pane; if it later needs to appear as a published footnote, simply copying and pasting into a new footnote/comment and removing the link-text would work.
Thanks, Mark. But my main reason to switch to Scrivener is to try to make the process faster and smoother; I think adding another document would do the opposite!
For what it’s worth, the best I’ve found so far is similar to what @xiamenese suggested. I’m just adding an asterisk for an “uncertain” footnote and then attaching an inspector comment to it; I then color all of those footnotes one color to separate them from the rest. It’s far from ideal, because I tend to prefer very quick text manipulations, but I haven’t found a better option. Thanks!
And I’m going to check out @nontroppo’s suggestion, but it might take me awhile to play around with regex (I’m not too familiar).
I quickly tested what happens to footnotes if the footnote body is deleted by a replacement (first footnote has been wrapped with «« »» the second footnote is unmarked, this is the compiled output from Scrivener:
[Lørem ipsum dolør sit amet]{.smallcaps} [@siegel2015; @crivellato2007], eu ipsum movet vix, veniam låoreet posidonium te eøs, eæm in veri eirmod. Sed illum minimum at, est mægna alienum mentitum ne. Amet equidem sit ex. Ludus øfficiis suåvitate sea in, ius utinam vivendum no, mei nostrud necessitatibus[^fn1] te? [Lørem ipsum dolør sit amet]{.underline}, eu ipsum movet vix, veniam låoreet posidonium[^fn2] te eøs, eæm in veri eirmod [@barrett2015; @crivellato2007].
[^fn2]: This is a footnote, **with** a citation [@crivellato2007].
Note the footnote marker [^fn1] is still present in the text but its body is removed. Ideally Scrivener would have ignored the marker. Pandoc does ignore [^fn1] but leaves the text in place, i.e. you don’t get a physical footnote in the output but you get plain text [^fn1]. These would be easy to remove with a script, and possibly we could use a pandoc filter to remove them before they got to the output. I assume something similar happens for Scrivener’s native compile outputs too (but there it will be impossible to parse them out before getting to the output).
Fascinating, thanks for this! So I know so little about regex, but I tried this and it actually did eliminate both the footnote anchor and the footnote text. The only thing is that it left the “<<” and “>>” markers in the text. I must be doing it incorrectly. In the Replacements section of compile, I put in <<.+?>> in the left column and then left the second column totally blank, then checked “regex.” Is there something I should do to ensure that the < markers themselves are not compiled?
I am using double angle quotation mark « and » which are not the same as << >>, but as long as you are consistent it doesn’t matter what character you use.
Note I was only using «« »» in the footnote itself…
…not the editor; but in fact using the markup in the editor itself is better if the word you mark is not required in the text. So this:
Amet equidem sit ex. Ludus øfficiis suåvitate sea in, ius utinam vivendum no, mei nostrud te?
i.e. the word necessitatibus and its linked footnote are cleanly removed. I don’t see the « or » left in the output text, are you putting markers both around the editor text and the footnote text? If you do that the regex will stop at the first close and probably leave »» in the text. Make sure you mark only the editor or footnote text, not both.
Thank you. I couldn’t check the forum earlier, but I ended up using an alternative string that also worked, for wrapping the non-compiled text in curly brackets:
{[^}]*}
Then I just left the “replace with” column blank.
This works, upon compile, both to eliminate the footnote anchor and text (when wrapped around the anchor); and to eliminate text within a footnote (part of the footnote text) (when wrapped around the text to be eliminated within the footnote).
