Although Scrivener has improved my writing experience exponentially, like many academic users I have had difficulty with footnotes and have experienced great stress while trying to get them to display and print correctly. I used to do my post-Scrivener processing in Word but now I have adopted LibreOffice. It has solved some problems but not all. From a productivity point of view, Scrivener is still something of a “risk program” for me because of its general problems with footnotes. I have had all sorts of problems with footnotes bleeding over on to the next page, footnotes obscuring page numbers, etc. and have missed many deadlines and have had to turn in poorly formatted work for fear of missing even more.
Having spent a lot of time on the forums, I have now found that using the current beta, exporting to docx, and then opening the document in LibreOffice (Mac) displays footnotes pretty well.
However, I still have one problem that I cannot solve:
Footnote numbers font size: the footnote number should appear as a small raised number at the bottom of the page. This should be the same kind of small raised number as the footnote number in the main text. For example, footnote number 25 should display as a small raised “25” at the end of the sentence where it was placed in the main text and also as a small raised “25” at the bottom of the page in the footnotes area. In the main text, I get this small raised number. However, I get full-sized, rather than small raised numbers in my footnotes section at the bottom of the page and I would like to find a way to fix this, either in Scrivener or LibreOffice.
If anyone can help me with this problem, I would be most grateful. In general, if anyone using Scrivener for footnote based work on a Mac has suggestions for a good workflow, I would like to hear them. I am keen to find a permanent fix because having to deal with this over and over again is hugely detrimental to routine work. My finished product is usually a footnoted piece of humanities academic writing in pdf format for printing. I do footnotes manually and therefore do not use Endnotes, Bookends or any other software (I have tried them but decided against them). I am looking to get from my Scrivener screen to a pdf document with properly formatted footnotes. It doesn’t sound like a lot to ask for but I cannot recount the sheer amount of distress this footnote problem causes me. I look forward to improvements in Scrivener that will make it reliable for academic professionals such as myself, although I understand that it was originally designed for creative writing and not citation based work. Thank you.
The formatting in LibreOffice is really nothing to do with Scrivener. Sure, Scrivener will pass on some formatting information, but getting the final result in LibreOffice demands setting things up properly in the latter program. I don’t use LibreOffice, but it took me about two minutes to work out how to get superscript footnote numbers, perhaps because I’m used to poking about with software. Go to the menu Format > Styles and Formatting, which opens a panel. Then RIGHT click on Footnote Characters. Choose “Modify”. This will open another panel. Go to the tab labelled “Position” – this is where you will find the choice to make the number superscript.
Cheers, Martin.
PS: if you want a permanent solution, try Nisus Writer Pro, or Mellel. Both good word processors.
PPS: Scrivener is perfectly reliable for academic professionals – I am one, and nowadays I wouldn’t use anything else. I don’t think it’s really fair to blame Scrivener for a problem with using LibreOffice – though perhaps that’s not what you meant. Scrivener has a few limitations. I work round them, just as I have to with every piece of software I use. None of them is perfect.
Make sure that “Use period and space instead of superscript in markers” is not ticked in the Footnotes/Comments pane of Compile. If that is already deselected, then everything should be fine. Scrivener’s footnotes and everything else have been tested thoroughly with Word, Nisus, Mellel, OpenOffice and others. If the markers are not appearing as you would expect in LibreOffice or if you are having other formatting issues in LibreOffice, then as Martin says, it may well be down to that program not reading RTF files entirely perfectly, and I’m afraid I have no control over that. All I can do is ensure that Scrivener writes out good RTF.
My intention was not to bash Scrivener and I appreciate you taking the time to reply so quickly. LibreOffice was recommended several times in the forums as a solution to this problem, hence my decision to switch to it (I had tried Word and NeoOffice before). The suggestion was: download LibreOffice and all your Scrivener footnote problems will disappear. However, LibreOffice cannot handle Scrivener rtf files, it just freezes up or crashes, so I export or compile from Scrivener in docx format which LibreOffice can manage well, bar the superscript problem in footnotes.
I tried Martin’s superscript formatting suggestion but it makes no difference. I will keep trying with LibreOffice and maybe consider other programs but I am probably at my limit for trying to experiment with new things for now, so it will be in the future some time. I will also try Keith’s suggestion for settings within Scrivener. For now, I am going back to writing in Word, which I don’t like but I know that what I see on the screen is how the document will come out when I want a pdf or print copy.
I don’t understand - if you have Word, why don’t you just open your exported files there? LibreOffice just provides a free alternative to Word, so I had assumed that you were using it because you didn’t want to shell out for Word. Scrivener’s RTF export should work flawlessly with Word.
In Word I have numerous problems with footnotes, regardless of whether the export from Scrivener is in rtf, doc, or docx. I read that LibreOffice was better and that’s why I started using it. It is a little better but I still have the superscript problem described above. Also, I don’t have Word on my computer, so I have to do it all at a public terminal in the library if I use word. I would rather not buy it or have it on my Mac because it involuntarily installs lots of other Microsoft bits and pieces all over the system.
That’s odd - Word should work fine; as I say, it has been extensively tested and other users aren’t having these issues, so my guess is that it is a set-up issue. Did you try the setting I mentioned before? If LibreOffice isn’t working out for you, what about OpenOffice or NeoOffice?
If you want, you could send us a sample project to mac.support AT literatureandlatte DOT com so that we can test your settings and see where the problem lies.
Thank you for your replies. I am going to purchase Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. Can you confirm if rtf files exported from Scrivener will work well with the version of Microsoft Word that is included in this package? Thanks, Peter.
Yes, RTF files exported from Scrivener should work well with Office 2011 - it is one of the main programs I test RTF files in. I believe there is a free trial of MS Word 2011 that you can test in, though, to be sure. Yep, here: