After trying most of today to get my book manuscript imported into Scrivener, I’m sadly concluding that I’ll have to wait for the full Windows version to be done before working on it in this program. In addition to the program crashing over RTF imports, the footnotes are a disaster.
They import not as footnotes at all - they’re all mixed into the main text, just in a smaller font, and when I compile back out into an RTF file, they’re not footnotes there anymore either.
Happily, I thought of several other uses for Scrivener in the mean time, but it’s such a shame I can’t use these amazing features for my biggest project! I knew I should have gotten a Mac.
That’s definitely a fair assessment. I think for importing a mature project into the current beta, it might be asking a little too much of it. Not everything is wired up yet, so documents with a lot of footnotes and such are not going to run as smoothly. We wanted to get a beta out there now for the NaNo crowd because they are all starting from scratch anyway (if they aren’t cheating!) and will be able to use the existing features to start building projects with more advanced features (like footnotes) even if everything isn’t working flawlessly yet on export. It’s a bit like writing for a web page that doesn’t exist yet. You know you’ll be able to drop the text in once the page is ready, but in the mean time you’ll need to work with just the text.
Hopefully despite the setback on getting your manuscript in, you’ll be able to play with the betas as they evolve, and make the jump once you can! If not, we’ll be happy to see you when it is more feature-complete.
Oh, I know what this is all about - you people are trying to tempt me into NaNoWriMo just when I need to be working my butt off on this boring scholarly book! Ha. Just what a needed!
Seriously, though, I’m a history prof and I realized today that Scrivener is a fantastic tool for working on handouts, assignments, and lectures - each of those as one project, with lots of little docs for individual chunks of text that can be mixed and matched and tinkered with endlessly. And all the labeling and keyword functions will come in very handy. And no footnotes! So I’m pasting in everything I have (not bothering with importing for now), and so far this is working great.
I hope to be able to still do some of my final book revisions here depending on the timing, but if not this one, then the next! I’d kill to have had this program from the time I started this project!
Hey, I like the big boring scholarly books, so you’ve got at least one fan.
Absolutely right on the flexibility of the program though. Internally we use Scrivener for all kinds of things that have little or nothing to with writing: keeping track of bug reports; cust. support documentation; development notes and ideas; job journals for keeping track of solutions, just to think of a few. It’s really quite suitable as a notebook style program with all of the meta-data and such going on.
Yeah I have the same problem when importing a document into Scriv - the footnotes are just smaller text after the sentence they’re footnoting. Grrr. The release cannot come fast enough. However, the beta won’t let me open a non-fiction project yet (I’m just about to scour the boards to find out why); does it perhaps have something to do with this?
Just a quick question - I am working in Scrivener Beta for Windows and would like to add footnotes. Not import them, simply add them by typing them in. Is this feature wired in yet? I go to Format - Footnote and nothing seems to happen, Or am I overlooking something?
Oh, right. You have to highlight the text first. I get it now.
I’d assumed it worked like Word.
And yes, Rob Campbell, I see what you mean about the ghosts of brackets persisting when the footnote is deleted!
Has this bug been reported?
