Footnotes next to each other

[IsleofGough]

I think it must be somehow Scrivener corrupted the project. I converted the footnotes back to inline footnotes and found about 2/3 of them had “Fn” as text before the footnotes. I searched and replaced these and then converted the footnotes back to regular footnotes and the compile worked.

Does anyone have the Mac version to look for the compile option to indent footnotes? I’ve seen this exists in the Windows version from several online posts, but it is not in the same place at least with the Mac version.

[Vincent_Vincent]

That is in the compile format.
Not the main compile settings.

Of course, yes, if it is elsewhere for a Mac, I have no clue where. @xiamenese
But everything that exists in the Windows version (aside very rare tiny whatnots here and there) are also in the Mac version.
The Windows version is a derivative of the Mac’s.

[Vincent_Vincent]

@IsleofGough

I get the “sorry, you can’t embed media items in a post” message

It takes a few days before you can. (Spam protection.)

[IsleofGough]

That is exactly what is missing in my menu: “Indent footnotes and endnotes to match text”. I wonder where it is in the Mac version.

[Vincent_Vincent]

What format are you compiling to ?
PDF, RTF, Docx ?

Epubs don’t have that if I remember properly.

[IsleofGough]

I’m compiling to pdf. Thanks.

[Vincent_Vincent]

Search for “Indent footnotes and endnotes” in the manual. (?)

[xiamenese]

On Mac, Right/Control click to edit compile format, then:

Note: This is my RTF compile format, but it should be the same for compiling to PDF, I think. Basically, I believe Scrivener compiles an RTF file and then uses a print to PDF routine to output the PDF.

Mark

[Vincent_Vincent]

So… exact same emplacement.

[xiamenese]

Yes, but the UI details follow the standard for Windows-Qt and what the devs have programmed on the one hand, and the Apple UI standards and guidelines, which KB follows on the other. So, for instance, we don’t have a separate pane for endnotes.

Mark

[Vincent_Vincent]

@xiamenese

we don’t have a separate pane for endnotes.

That is exclusive to PDF compile.

But we do have nasty panel corners that make one happy they’re only virtual…
(There’d be blood shed otherwise. – Not the type of corner you want to throw yourself onto if you ever choke.)

[IsleofGough]

I submitted a bug report to Scrivener.

I don’t see the menu in the compile settings for “indent footnotes and endnotes to match text”. The only way I get this is to copy and edit the compile option and then there is a checkbox. However, trying both with the checkbox checked and not checked, it doesn’t actually indent the footnotes when compiled.

Obviously I am new to Scrivener. I see advantages over some of the alternatives, like low price, easy to set up an outline and then edit the sections, a place to store images, etc. One doesn’t need to understand coding of CSS or really the deep end of compiling or structure. But:

• The footnotes require a lot of customization of a style for commas between footnotes. A simple superscript does not work and I have to change the size and baseline shift and assign a custom style. It is a lot of trial and error

• Scrivener crashed a couple of times in a day of using it (high spec Mac Pro). I have no crashes with Word, OxygenXML, Framemaker, or Flare through Parallels

• The format is proprietary. In Flare or Oxygen (or even “mif” for Framemaker), one can edit the document in a text editor and troubleshoot problems. A simple thing like having a paragraph style assigned footnotes doesn’t appear to be possible. If one tries to do that, it changes the paragraph style in the referenced text above. The advanced compile options are fairly restricted and editing of these is limited.

• One can get the equivalent outline advantages with Framemaker, Flare, or OxygenXML quite easily and the files get saved in a noncompressed format in a directory. Unlike Scrivener for Windows, the Mac version does not do this but creates a compressed directory. You can"open contents" in OSX to see what is actually there. Editing in this is apparently problematic.

What I was looking for was a sort of unstructured Framemaker replacement with the ability to split things up into smaller topics without having to use DITA or Docbook or Flare.

[Vincent_Vincent]

@IsleofGough

the files get saved in a noncompressed format in a directory. Unlike Scrivener for Windows, the Mac version does not do this but creates a compressed directory

Err… no. (?)
Scrivener doesn’t compress anything, except zip a backup if told to.
If it actually compresses the project folder on its own for Mac, first time I ever hear about it.
(I might be running the Windows version, but if there was such an issue for Mac, there’d be threads about it on the forum. Enough for me to have come across one…)
Couldn’t that just be your hard-drive settings ? Default for new folders or something ?
I can compress new folders on windows, but that has nothing to do with Scrivener…

[November_Sierra]

@Vincent_Vincent

If it actually compresses the project folder on its own for Mac, first time I ever hear about it.

That’s correct, as far as I can see. The project is a “package” (still a folder), but the files inside of it are accessible without decompression. Maybe that’s where the confusion started. It looks like an archive at first glance.

[IsleofGough]

Packages are not folders in OSX. You can “view contents” but any editing is likely to corrupt the package. Final Cut Pro X and Apple photos use packages and I avoid them for that reason.

[November_Sierra]

@IsleofGough

Packages are not folders in OSX. You can “view contents” but any editing is likely to corrupt the package.

They are folders. They are not presented as folders. Not because that could corrupt the package per se, but to discourage users from poking around and mess up the files inside.

“A package is any directory that the Finder presents to the user as if it were a single file. […] Even though packages are treated as opaque files by default, it is still possible for users to view and modify their contents. […] The user can use this window to navigate the package’s directory structure and make changes as if it were a regular directory hierarchy.” Source: About Bundles

From the same source:

The Finder considers a directory to be a package if any of the following conditions are true:

• The directory has a known filename extension: .app, .bundle, .framework, .plugin, .kext, and so on.
• The directory has an extension that some other application claims represents a package type; see Document Packages.
• The directory has its package bit set.

[IsleofGough]

Knowing the underlying format of Scrivener is rtf rather than xhtml or other specification is useful for understanding its strengths and weaknesses.

[gr]

@IsleofGough

The footnotes require a lot of customization of a style for commas between footnotes. A simple superscript does not work and I have to change the size and baseline shift

My installation of Word presents the very same challenges when you want two footnotes in the same spot. Maybe things have gotten better in a more recent version that you have.

[Vincent_Vincent]

Many things I don’t quite understand here…

1- Why two footnotes in the same place ? Why not make it a two paragraph footnote ?
(As I said earlier, I’ve never seen it for as much as I can remember. But I read novels; technical books, I wouldn’t really know.)

2- Why would someone want them so consecutive that instead of rendering as 1 and 2, the reference numbers would compile as 12 ? (I’ve shown that it is actually easy to insert a symbol (superscript &, or -) or a space in-between, giving them at least some clarity. – Which at the same time fixes the issue of having them merged by Scrivener.)
→ It works with a comma too, btw:

You just need to use the built-in footnote marker x2 (see up the thread), and superscript whatever you put in-between them.

3- Applying a style to a footnote actually works for the character attributes. (Again, I just don’t get why someone would want the footnotes to indent differently than either the body text, or not at all…)

But I guess that if one really really wants them to indent their own way, it’d be possible to use non-break spaces. You’d just need to know how many from a footnote to the next, so it is consistent throughout the book. (Assuming the footnotes are short, else, if it they require more than a single line, I’d say someone is looking for trouble. – And nothing to be done with the positioning of the footnote ID…)
Other than:

(I personally wouldn’t even use that option to center short footnotes… – Looks amateurish imo.)

---

[EDIT] OK, my bad, although applying a style looked like it worked (my 3rd point), I was actually fooled by the override font option of my compile format.
But… one might as well use that to get the font he/she wants then. I doubt someone will want the footnote’s font to change from a footnote to the next anyway…

And as far as the “special” indenting goes: the way I see it, footnotes are not supposed to be visually appealing. They are merely side informations. A supplement. A complement. But not the point of focus.

If you really insist on customizing your footnotes: Use styles all over the body text, set the formatting of your compile format to be the way you want your footnotes to be formatted, uncheck override font for the footnotes, and, finally, expect no approval whatsoever from LL staff.
(Although this would work, I am only joking here. Saying just in case.)

[IsleofGough]

Thanks Vincent. It is a bit frustrating that I cannot upload an image to show the issue, but I’ve corresponded directly with the company and they basically said I would need to fix the formatting in Word.

Technically, you are correct that you need something between consecutive footnotes or endnotes. But there is a better solution below. A superscripted comma will not align properly in a pdf output, but I can create a character style that shrinks the comma and baseline aligns three times to fix that. Probably the best solution I saw for Scrivener in replies above was to use some strange character you don’t use for anything else and then search and replace that in whatever program you use to do the final output. However, the reason your solution is not ideal is that you need to put some special character or a comma with character style between every consecutive footnote or endnote. For scientific or historical work, this is very time-consuming. The best solution is that the program fixes this in the compile, so that you can put consecutive footnotes or endnotes and the spacing and separation are defined by the compile.

The indentation of the footnotes itself is actually a bigger issue. If you compare the indentation of footnotes in Word or InDesign with that compiled to pdf from Scrivener, you can easily see the difference. The problem, though, even with these programs is how they store this internally. For instance, it is common to create an autonumbering paragraph style that puts a period and a tab after the numbers and then indents the lines after the first to match the tab stop. That works fine for printed output but is terrible for ePub or HTML, where absolute distances are seldom used. In HTML, these are generally coded as an ordered or unordered list, not a paragraph style.

An even bigger issue is multisourcing of mathematical formulas. In HTML or ePub, these are generally done with MathML, so that they scale properly with the associated text. In print, they are best translated to SVG or PDF equivalents.

The solution to all these issues is to use some internal system with element structure that translates to different formats in ways that are correct for the target. One can code this oneself (as I have done in structured Framemaker), but it is easiest to use something like DITA or Docbook that already has translation systems in place that can be tweaked for the look you want. This solves all the above issues, because it is in the compile that everything is fixed to look good.