I sometimes use Scrivener’s inline footnotes “style” as a secondary class of inline annotation and comment, easy to see in the text, and easy to differentiate from Comments.
For this reason, I would like to have the option to export footnotes to “inline comments,” in addition to exporting as Comments, Footnotes, and Endnotes, along with the option to set its own “Enclosing Markers” independent of those for comments and annotations.
I had hoped that setting the footnote export option to Comments would then subject footnotes to the same options as the “Comments,” but no. The footnotes, when opened in Word, appear as regular Word comments, which makes sense… but isn’t what I want.
It is possible to convert Word comments to inline text using a VBA macro, so all is not lost. (See macro code here: wordbanter.com/showthread.php?t=132036).
But it would be nice if this was an option within Scrivener. Footnotes and the comments/annotations, though nominally used for different things, are really more similar to each other than different, so limiting them to conventional “footnote” and “comment” behaviors seems, well, limiting, almost arbitrary, when you think about it.
I think once styles are implemented that will do what you are looking for. Rather than using footnotes as a second inline note stream, you’ll be able to set up a style that can be used as notes, as it will be possible to set a style to not export at all when you compile.
It might be worth noting that you can change the text color of annotations to create a visually distinct sort of annotation. And this distinction will carry over when these are converted to “inline comments” in Word – which just brackets the inline text and preserves your text color.
The only downside to this technique is that there is no apparent way to make easy key commands for switching between different colors of annotation. (This is because the only place a menu of text colors appears is on a contextual menu, not a regular menu.) But after you hit cmd-shift-A to start an annotation, you can control-click in the editor and choose a Text Color on the resulting contextual menu. That will set the text color of annotations henceforth until you change it again. Alternatively, you can, of course, select an already-typed annotation text and set the text color via that menu or to the color palette.
best,
gr
EDIT: Just noticed you’re on the Windows version. Your possibilities and pocedures may vary.
