My apologies if this issue has been addressed before. If it has, just point me to the discussion thread!
I’m having an issue with footnote superscript placement. Scrivener automatically places the superscript inside quotation marks and/or punctuation, which means once I export into Word, I have to go in and manually fix every single one. I’m currently working on a 50+ page field exam and have over 300 footnotes (yes, I’m a bit footnote happy), so the prospect of having to manually edit every single one of them once I take the doc over to Word is daunting. Any suggestions?
I presume that when you “Add footnote”, a string is highlighted and the footnote number will follow that string on compile.
If you go to Project > Project Settings > Formatting, at the top of the pane is a tick-box labelled “Use Footnote Marker” with the default asterisk that you can change to whatever you want. There is also a button “Make Default”, which sets it in your global preferences. When you’ve set that, the marker will be placed wherever your cursor is located; furthermore you can drag the marker to a different location if necessary,
I don’t know if you can use this retrospectively on existing footnotes, other than by copying the text, deleting the footnote and adding a new one with the marker and pasting the text.
There’s also a setting in Preferences > Editing > Options, under the Footnotes and Comments section. The manual says this about it… p783.
Terminate footnotes before punctuation Some type setting styles callfor footnote markers to be placed before the terminating punctuation for a se tence, rather than after it, or for when individual words are referenced rather than the entire sentence. Select this option if you require this format. You can always manually define where the marker will be placed by selecting the range of text you wish to comment on, prior to making the note. This only alters the behaviour used when selection is made automat- ically in lieu of a selection.
Besides the good advice given above, it’s worth noting that Scrivener only automatically assumes anything if you give it a mere hint of what you want. E.g. if you put your cursor somewhere within the word that should be followed by a footnote, it’ll do the most logical thing it can and highlight that word (and punctuation around it, depending on the aforementioned setting). But you definitely have precise control over marker placement if you want it:
Preselect the text that you want marked—this can be as much or little as you want. Consider that once you have the cursor where the marker should be, you can press ⇧← or ⇧⌥← to select back by character or word. It might seem ponderous at first, but this is the only way I make notes (usually I select the whole relevant text rather than just one word of it) and I don’t even think about it. You get used to whatever you do often.
To fix or move selections after the fact, make the selection so the right-edge falls where the marker should be precisely, and then right-click on the footnote in the inspector and use the “Move to Selection” command (or drag and drop the footnote onto the modified selection).
Hint, you can drop the cursor into a hyperlink (what a footnote highlight technically is) without activating it, by holding down the Option key when clicking.
Now you can get things cleaned up in Scrivener, and never bother with doing this after compiling, again.
Myself though, I prefer inline footnotes. Like the marker option you can see exactly where the output marker will be, and I can edit/read the content of the note without having to open up panels, click on things, and so forth. But I also have a density of footnote to text that could be loosely referred to as homeopathic.
