Hi,
I’s be really glad if you could help me fast here. I’m past my deadline…
i’ve compiled a huge document in Scrivener with lots of footnotes, but the footnotes are all missing in the exported version. I’ve tried RTF and DocX formats and it doesn’t make a difference. And yes, “print footnotes” is activated.
Another matter: The text is all pushed together both in RTF and DocX. This seems to be because pages are wider in Scrivener. Any help with that?
But the footnotes problem is the really urgent problem.
Make sure that you are opening the RTF file (.docx won’t have footnotes at all, that engine doesn’t support them at this time) in a word processor that can actually read RTF footnotes. Chances are high that they are actually there, but you are opening the file in a program that cannot read them, like TextEdit or Pages. Try LibreOffice, which is free, and provides a pretty good preview of what someone in Word will see. Or if you’ve got Word, that’s obviously going to be the best program to proof the output in.
thank you getting back to me so fast. Yes, the footnotes are there IF I export the document by RTF and then mail it to someone to open the Document with Word on someone else’s computer (I don’t use Microsoft programs) and then mail it to myself and then open it with Pages. What a bummer.
I loved writing my book on Scrivener, but I must say I’m less than impressed with what I see now. It’s not at all what it looked like in the editor. The page outline on Scrivener was wider, now after export it’s very narrow and everything is pushed together.
Some footnotes run over onto the bottom of the next page which is something footnotes should NEVER do.
The fonts in Scrivener looked tiny, so I had to use Arial 14 point to be able to read my own writing. Now it’s huge.
I do hope there will be updates soon to solve these issues.
There is a better engine for .doc/x export in development right now. In fact you can try it if you wish, as it is in public beta. In the meanwhile if you’d rather not, as I recommended you can use LibreOffice to open these RTF files and then save it from there as a .doc file for Pages. No need to have your colleague do that for you, and if you are attempting to wrestle out better formatting as it sounds like you are, introducing a third element of complexity and unknowns into your workflow is going to make all of that more difficult.
Well, I would say let’s not try and figure that out quite yet until you have your own conversion set up. We have no idea what the other person did with the RTF file when they converted it. For all we know they applied some stylesheet to it or something. If you are willing to try the beta, definitely do that first. I’ve tested between Scrivener 2.2.0.5 and Pages using .docx and the results are very nice. Pretty much precisely how you tell Scrivener to format the document.
I’m not quite sure what you mean, but if you are saying what I think you mean, that depends on your style guide. Some in fact do call for that behaviour. At any rate, we don’t have any control over that at all. We insert the proper footnote codes, and that that point it’s up to the word processor to handle them and display them in accordance with the style guide you need or prefer. The footnote code itself isn’t “on a page” so to speak, in the RTF file. There actually aren’t any pages in RTF files, in the same sense that there are in PDFs. That level of detail is handled by the display engine of the word processor in real time. Again, this could be a setting your colleague made in Word, or it could be in Pages, but those are the only two places that layout would come from.
Okay, thanks again. I’ll try to sort it all out after my crazy deadline. For now, the editor of my project will just have to put up with what I’m sending him.
I recently tried opening the SAME rtf file in various word processors (Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel, Word 2004 [Mac], and the latest Word for Windows). The difference between them was quite extraordinary – and it can only have been down to the word processors and the way they interpret fonts, widows and orphans, and various other things, not Scrivener. A favourite trick of MS Word seems to be deciding that your document language WILL be American English, no matter what you wrote it in, and it WILL be on US Letter, even if you set it up to be on postage stamps. Spitting on your taste in fonts and choosing its own is another endearing characteristic. In short, there is not as much consistency as one might innocently hope and expect. It’s one of the “features” of using computers that one has to be aware of and try to work around.
But one of the great features of Scrivener is precisely that you can compose in one font size and compile in another!?? Or why not use the zoom in the editor to increase the size of the text for working on screen??
Then why is there a setting in many word processors to control the flow of footnotes from one page to the next?! There are various books on my shelf that do exactly this.
I understand the anguish of deadlines very well – I’ve just handed in five years’ work – so I hope it all turns out OK.
That’s a good point, if your colleague was using Windows, that will almost surely make a mess of things. Even going from Word Mac to Word Win can be spotty, but when you switch platforms all bets are off, especially with Word and its eagerness to try and do everything for you. But like I say, I’ve been testing the Scrivener beta -> .docx -> Pages workflow quite a bit and it’s one of the best transfers I’ve seen. Very good results. RTF with Nisus Writer Pro is another fantastic combination.
Oh, and if you’re using comments, that will also make a mess of things, because Word will often narrow the main text so that it can print comments in the margins, which it will have made enormously wide to facilitate this … The joys of Word.
Would that impact Pages on the rebound though? For me it makes the document window wider when opening something with comments, to accommodate the margin sidebar.
Hey Ioa, it seems to be your birthday! Congrats – I was wondering what you were doing up at this time.
I have a copy of Pages but I never use it, so I can’t comment. I just know that I’ve had trouble with Word and comments – particularly in the PC / Mac switch between another person and me.
It’s a lot less frightening than you might think. Our betas are usually very safe to use because the program is quite stable these days. They are in fact often more stable than the current official version.
