Footnote / RTF problem

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I assume there’s a simple answer to this but i couldn’t find it. I accidently discovered that when I export in RTF footnotes / endnotes are not retained at all. If I export in RTFD they appear as endnotes only. I’ve tried different ways of exporting, but I can never get footnotes instead of endnotes. I’m using Scrivener 1.11 on MacBook Pro running Leopard 10.5.2
George

2

What app are you trying to read your exported document in? If you’re using Pages for instance, that doesn’t display footnotes, but they should be fine in Nisus, or in Mellel I believe. The problem is that any word processor relying on Apple’s RTF importer, unless it has been modified as in Nisus, will fail to display footnotes.

Mark

3

I’m using TextEdit which may be the problem then. If so why would it show endnotes but not footnotes?
George

4

Yes, TextEdit doesn’t display footnotes. My guess is that footnotes are a more complex problem in that to accommodate them a variable space has to be allocated at the bottom of the page when needed and they have to be done in such a way that, if more text is added above the point where the footnote anchor is, the footnote can migrate to the next physical page if the anchor does, whereas endnotes are just tacked on at the end of the text as a whole, so those complications do not arise. Someone who has much more technical knowledge than me … Keith or one of the other programmers on the forum could explain better, I’m sure.

If you don’t have Nisus or Mellel, Neo-Office will open footnotes, I believe.

Mark

5

RTFD doesn’t support footnotes or endnotes, so when you export to that format, Scrivener just appends the footnotes and makes them look like endnotes so that they will at least be there. RTF does support footnotes and endnotes, so if you export as RTF, Scrivener creates true RTF footnotes that will appear correctly in Word, Nisus, Mellel, OpenOffice and other programs that fully support RTF. Unfortunately neither TextEdit nor Pages support RTF properly, so if you try to open an RTF file with footnotes in one of those programs, you will find that they get dropped. You can see the same thing if you create a document in MS Word with footnotes and save it as RTF - the footnotes won’t appear in TextEdit or Pages.

All the best,
Keith

6

Thanks for the help. Guess it’s time to get a new word processor.
George