I’ve written a long piece of journalism that I’m now preparing to transfer to a word-processing program. It has more than 200 footnotes which I keep for my own reference purposes, not for publication. Is there any way to erase all those footnotes at once, together with their reference numbers, for the version that I’ll transfer to the word processor? Or do I have to click on the “X” in their upper right-hand corner, one by one?
Oh no! No need to do anything tedious like that. What you want to do is click the All Options tab when you compile, and select “Footnotes/Comments”. In the top section of that option pane, you’ll see a checkbox labelled “Remove footnotes”. Check that off, and footnotes will be stripped out. This only impacts that output file. Your notes stay safe in the source for future reference.
A more permanent way of stripping out notes (of any kind) from a document in the Scrivener editor is to select the text you wish to clean out, and use the Edit/Copy Special/Copy Without Comments and Footnotes menu command, then just paste right back over the text. That will remove all inline and linked notes. You might want to snapshot before doing something that destructive. Like I say though, this program is designed to let you make a mess in the editor while working, and output a clean copy at the end. So there is generally no need to do a lot of labour intensive work.
Thank you, AmberV. Your posting also had the benefit of alerting me to the “compile” function, which I didn’t know about. That is about to come in handy.
Wow, if you didn’t know about one of the major features of Scrivener, but were still loving it, then I’d like to suggest that you take 10 minutes out of your day and view the first video here: literatureandlatte.com/videos.php
It may prove revelatory, exposing features that you don’t even know you really, really need right now!
