When adding a footnote or comment, it very nicely highlights the last word in the sentence so they are easily visible.
However, I do a lot of rewriting, including the final word. Is there a way to make notes/comments not highlight that word? Or how can I drop that word to rewrite without also deleting the attached note/comment?
I use a kludgy work around:
The first assumes that you are adding footnotes/comments at the end of sentences. To prevent highlighting the final word, select the full stop and then proceed to add your footnote. That way the full stop will be highlighted, not the word, and you can edit away.
You can add comments/footnotes mid sentence too by highlighting a blank space or punctuation mark.
Scrivener highlights the final word and the full stop for me by default whether the caret is after the full stop, before it or within the final word. As such, you should be able to go back and delete the final word of each sentence safely, as the footnote will still be attached to the full stop.
Of course, if there’s a better way I’d love to hear it.
With the insertion point within the commented text, you can delete or type new text that will be part of the comment so long as you’re within the bounds of the comment. This is pretty simple if you’ve selected a range of text to apply the comment/footnote to, rather than just a single word, although I sometimes just do the same thing with one word, writing in the middle and then cleaning up the last characters on either side.
You can drag and drop the comments/footnotes from the inspector onto another word in the editor or onto a range of selected text to move the comment there. You can also select text and then right-click the comment and choose “Move to Selection”. This makes it pretty easy to add your new text, then drag the comment to the new final word and erase the old stuff.
Thanks for these MM, very useful to know.
Another option for footnotes is to enable “Use footnote marker” in Project > Text Preferences… This will add a marker in the editor and link the footnote to that instead of your text, so it won’t be in your way. Just note that if you later disable this option for the project, that footnote marker is going to appear in the compiled text instead of being stripped out, so you’ll need to clean it up yourself. (Going the other direction, from regular linked footnotes to footnotes linked to a marker, won’t cause a problem.)
If you prefer this style for footnotes, you can click the “Make Default” button to make it the default method for all your projects. Otherwise, ticking the option only makes it the behaviour for that particular project.
Ah, thank you both muchly.