Epigraph positioning

I’ve incorporated a number of Epigraphs at the beginning of many Chapters, Sections and Subsections, in my Scrivener+LaTeX document. However, I’ve run into a positioning error when I attempt to include an active cite link at the base of the Epigraph.

As an example of an Epigraph with the following Epigraph text:

{“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”\African Proverb.}

that does not include an active cite link, but as such is correctly positioned:

As an example of an Epigraph with the following Epigraph text:

{“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”\African Proverb.}}{(\cite{nkata_2019_until})

that does include an active cite link, but as such is not correctly positioned:

When the active cite link is included in the Epigraph, here ‘(Nkata (2019)’, the entire Epigraph as well as the active cite link is shifted several characters to the right, cut off on the right-edge of the page.

Any thoughts as to what may be driving the inadvertent shift toward the right would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading,
scrive
:thinking:

You’ve reported this as an interface bug (something to do with how the software draws itself) in Scrivener—but it is unclear exactly how to go about seeing this, or indeed if any of this is even in Scrivener at all, as what I’m looking at in these screenshots does not look like Scrivener’s layout, but instead perhaps how a PDF might look?

Confused.

Hi AmberV,

Thanks for the question.

My omission, but the images included ARE from the PDF printouts after the Scrivener+LaTeX project is compiled using the Epigraph texts as discussed.

Since I am using Scrivener with LaTeX, I would have posted the question on StackExchange except that the issue appears to occur when I try to include an active cite link, e.g. \cite{ } in a Scrivener Epigraph.

Let me know if there are any other questions.

Thanks for reading,
scrive
:thinking:

Since I am using Scrivener with LaTeX, I would have posted the question on StackExchange except that the issue appears to occur when I try to include an active cite link, e.g. \cite{ } in a Scrivener Epigraph.

Okay, so I think all that really matters here is whether what is in the .tex file is correct or not. If some kind of Scrivener bug is causing unexpected output then I would need a detailed example of the input and the expected output in order to take a look at it.

If we’re just talking about what happens if you type in the .tex by hand and your configuration of packages and such causes this result no matter how you get the syntax, then we can exclude Scrivener from the equation.

Hi AmberV,

Let me have a deeper look into what, if any, LaTeX code may be involved in the Epigraph. Just now, I found a LaTeX \renewcommand{\epigraphsize} that may have something to do with what is happening, that I did not see before.

Apologies for not seeing this earlier, but I’m reaching the end of my day and was unaware of the existence of the \renewcommand{\epigraphsize} code.

I’ll follow up once I’ve determined if there’s anything amiss in the LaTeX code. To confuse things a bit more, I’ve also found an Epigraph that HAS an active cite link that positions perfectly. I need to pick through and compare the two Epigraphs character-by-character to see what is going on …

Thanks for your help,
scrive
:thinking:

Okay, I’ll go ahead and remove the Scrivener bug tracking tags for now, unless you discover otherwise.

Thanks … apologies for the premature posting!
scrive
:thinking:

The expression you posted appears to be malformed. If that is not just a slip up in the reportage, then maybe the culprit is a LaTeX typo. This might, as I say, be an artifact of cutting out the example, but the braces as reported here are not balanced: there are two close-brackets after ‘Proverb.’ And the immediately following open bracket is unmatched by anything in the snippet.

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Good catch, I suspect that may be the entirety of the problem, and am surprised that wasn’t throwing an error in layout.

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Hi gr,

There WAS an error in my posting, but NOT the one you pointed out. The error was that, for some unknown reason, whenever a double slash, e.g.: \\ is typed into a web page such as this, one of the slashes magically disappears!!! Instead of a single slash in front of the term ‘African Proverb’, the Epigraph texts should have read:

{“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”\\African Proverb.}

and:

{“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”\\African Proverb.}}{(\cite{nkata_2019_until})

respectively.

As for the malformed brackets, you were correct in that the above Epigraph texts appeared to be missing opening and closing brackets { } around each of the texts, but that is for a reason. The way that the Epigraphs are implemented in my Scrivener+LaTeX project is with the following command:

\dsplepigraph{0.90}{<$custom:Epigraph>}

at the beginning of each chapter, section or subsection, which replaces the term <$custom:Epigraph> with text that I’ve placed in the Custom Metadata Epigraph field:

to create the final Epigraph with the proper opening and closing brackets { } by substituting the Epigraph text:

“Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center,\said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world.\“People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’” he said.\”\textbf{I always say no. It’s going to get worse.}”}{(\cite{fuller_2020_a})”

for the \dsplepigraph argument <$custom:Epigraph>. The complete Epigraph is therefore:

\dsplepigraph{0.90}{ Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center,\said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world.\“People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’” he said.\”\textbf{I always say no. It’s going to get worse.}”}{(\cite{fuller_2020_a}) }

Hope this explains what is going on with my Epigraphs.

And finally, regarding my initial posting where I explained that for some unknown reason, my Epigraphs with active cite links were mysteriously shifting to the right off the page. It turns out the reason for that shift had to do with a parameter within the Epigraph macro that I had adopted off of StackExchange at Width of epigraphs. By adjusting the setting for the parameter \epigraphwidth from 0.75 to 1.15:

\setlength{\epigraphwidth}{0.75\textwidth}

to

\setlength{\epigraphwidth}{1.15\textwidth}

I was able to stop the Epigraphs with active cite links from shifting toward the right, off the edge of the page.

It feels so good when a plan comes together!
scrive
:thinking:

If you click the icon that looks like “</>” in the format bar on an empty line, that will insert a code block template that you can safely paste code into. As a trick, you can type “latex” directly after the ``` on the first line to indicate that code language to get a little syntax highlighting:

```latex
\emph{This works!}
```

Otherwise you are pasting code into a Markdown editor, which will very often result in stuff getting messed up since Markdown punctuation may coincide with syntax punctuation.

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Hi AmberV,

Thanks for the tips … just curious … is there such as an “inline code block” available on this site?

Thanks again,
scrive

Yes, if you use that same button while in a paragraph you’ll get single backticks `like this` ⇒ like this.

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See also: Markdown Reference (CommonMark). That’s what the forum software refers to.

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Hi November_Sierra ( and AmberV ),

Thank you for the reference … very nice to have handy whenever composing a posting here on this website …

November_Sierra ( and AmberV ): Other than the link you’ve provided in your response (thank you again for that!), for those of us that are less savvy than many of the Scrivener participants here, is there a handy, accessible link available at the point and time where and when we are composing a post or a response, in lieu of our having to remember all of the Markdown syntax?

I am operating under the impression that the operating software that is utilized to operate this community forum may not be owned or otherwise under the control of L&L. If so, I therefore realize that L&L many not have anything to do with altering what functionality may or may not be available, such as having the Markdown Reference link readily available to those of us that take advantage of this helpful resource. If not, then I would like to suggest that allowing such a feature to be readily available would be appreciated by at least this occasional contributor.

Thanks again for the Markdown Reference link,
scrive
:thinking:

Not that I’m aware of (but there’s a lot that I’m not aware of, so who knows). The good news is: Likely you won’t need it anyways, because the functionality is neatly hidden behind the formatting buttons above the editor and the corresponding keyboard shortcuts (see: mouse hover tooltips).

E.g. regarding your inline code question: Highlight the words you want to markup (or down) and press the </> Button or E. Repeat to undo. Pay attention which code the editor uses. After a while it sticks.

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