Here is a feature request submitted for consideration.
When compiling to ePub, I would like to have dual footnote streams - one stream for end-of-chapter footnotes, and a separate stream for endnotes.
Thank you.
I’m not getting how this is meant to be used, on the reading side of things. Are you expecting people to manually flip forward 20 pages to the nearest chapter break, one button press at a time, consult a list of notes, and then manually one click at a time, go back 20 pages to where they were reading?
If not—what is being gained by this layout? Why does it matter where the footnotes are actually stored, if 99.99% of the interaction with them is going to be tapping on a hyperlink that either produces an on the fly popup or takes you to a back matter location where you can either link back, or press the device’s Back button?
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Moderator Note: moved to the Wish List board.
I would use the end-of-chapter footnotes for “explanatory” footnotes - notes that provide more information about an item mentioned within the chapter. I would use the end-of-book footnotes for standard reference citations. See the example below.
In both instances, the reader would touch the footnote reference in the main body of text, then be taken to the specific footnote via hyperlink. Then, they’d touch the footnote to be taken back to where they were in the main text. So no, the reader would not “manually flip forward 20 pages to the nearest chapter break”.
IMHO, this feature would permit the creation of “cleaner”, more professional-looking ebooks, with the explanatory footnotes appearing at the end of the pertinent chapter, and all the citation footnotes pushed to the back of the book. You often see this style in academic texts.
Thanks.
Scrivener already supports dual note-streams, with in-line and inspector notes. In the print-oriented formats, you can compile one as footnotes and the other as endnotes, with independent numbering, to address exactly this need.
Ioa, is there a way to handle the two streams differently in the ePub formats? I looked, and didn’t see one.
Katherine
You can have Scrivener automatically tidy up the endnotes section, which to my mind is more like what you’re after. The Group endnotes by section with subheadings option will make it so each section the notes come from are presented together in the list. It’s still one list in one place—but again in an ebook spatial concerns matter very little, when you’re talking about hyperlinked resources.
And of course, there is also the constant baseline answer that ultimately in Scrivener you can do just about anything because it lets you create your own HTML. You could build your own notation lists, complete with cross-references, and put them wherever you want. You’d have to build that infrastructure yourself, but the tools are there if you want them.
In this case it does not—again mainly because there is not much point in having multiple repositories of notes cached in different “places” in a non-linear format. An ebook is structured a lot more like a website and a lot less like a book.
Now one thing I do see a good argument for is having different marker types. Maybe there would be some utility in having inline footnotes use one marker format and inspector notes another, and maybe even listing them in two groups per section (or all together if that checkbox is disabled). That makes a lot more sense to me than having some notes scattered in separate .xhtml files that are essentially at the same navigation level as chapters, where the user would have to page through them by hand.