I think this sounds good, and I agree with Mark about keeping Ghosting around. I’ll probably end up using hiding more than ghosting, but there are some projects where ghosting would be nicer. It depends on what the notations are being used for.
What Amber said.
Guess I could have been more concise and just said “Word!” but that’s almost a cuss 'round these parts.
Ditto on what Mark and Amber said. Sounds good!
Alexandria
What Amber, Mark, Brett and Alexandria said.
Heh, well, now it turns out that we might not have hidden annotations or footnotes at all. It turns out that the code the Developer Technical Support guy sent me had some serious problems, and he is not returning my e-mails - and given that this sort of thing is largely undocumented, it’s almost impossible to figure out without specialist help.
Oh well.
All the best,
Keith
Well, we’ve lived this long without 'em! Maybe the tech guy will get back to you eventually. If not, thanks for trying.
Alexandria
Well, the tech guy didn’t, but I posted on the dev forums and the Apple text guru who my tech guy actually consulted (it turns out) got back to me… So… Hmm, maybe it will be back in after all! We shall see… Everything I said earlier, applies, mind - about all annotations and/or all footnotes being hidden at one time etc.
Best,
Keith
Okay, here’s how I see how they would look when collapsed:
i.e. An asterisk that is the colour of the annotation will appear when annotations are collapsed, a grey superscript “n” will appear to represent collapsed footnotes. If you can think of a better indicator (it has to fit between characters/words), I would be glad to hear them. I suppose there could just be a simple vertical line, for instance.
All the best,
Keith
Not that I use them much, so this feature won’t really affect me, but wouldn’t it make more sense for them to be a superscript “a” and “f”, rather than “*” and “n”?
Oh, Antony! You’re just too damn practical!
Dave
Sounds great! I think this would be easier to read on projects with lots of notes, and perhaps it enables a gentler adaptation for those used to a word processor. Further, when you wish to read the notes, perhaps you won’t be thrown to some other part of the document in a jarring notion as in most word processors. It seems like it could be the best of both worlds. Thanks, Keith!
–Bryce
Yay for the return, possibly, of collapsing footnotes! I like a and f too for notations, but if there is a reason why they don’t work and these work better, I’m quite sure we’ll all happily adapt!
Thanks so much for persevering on this, Keith!
Alexandria
I was originally going to have a “cf” and “fn”. But all of the annotation/footnote is collapsed to zero-space, so it needs something very small (if you were to have an annotation with no space between it and the preceding letter, the marker would get drawn behind the text, so it has to be minimal).
Anyway, my thinking was, sure “a” and “f” make sense to us English speaking folk - but what about non-English folk? An asterisk is pretty universal for “see note” and “n” is often used for “number”. So, that was my thinking…
All the best,
Keith
Can you make it customisable? It’s impossible to satisfy those who want something visible and those who would rather have something hidden (see Scrivener Icon thread #12 & #35)
Ah, that’s a good point. Curse my anglophilism.
How about * and †, then? Or † and ‡? “n” for “number” just doesn’t seem intuitive to me.
That’s not a bad idea - it’s also thinner than “n”, which is a good thing.
signinstranger - making it customisable would cause problems, I think, as it would be best to use narrow characters given the space available. Making it a free choice would lead to complaints about drawing problems etc.
All the best,
Keith
Anthony’s option 1 (don’t know how to get the fancy t thing (and don’t care right now(as you can see parenthetical abuse continues (whose grumpy old man complaint was that again?)))). the double t thing will confuse certain vic-k personalities, not to mention drunken pigeons.
Alt-t.
† † † † † † † † † † † 
Oh, yeah… 
Good point.
Update: Unfortunately hiding and showing annotations and footnotes just isn’t going to happen. Yes, I know, I know, I’m gutted too. I turns out that even the fixed code was still buggy as all hell and would throw exceptions and stop typing working in rather obvious situations. Given that my Apple DTS man has gone quiet and stopped responding to my e-mails sometime ago and I haven’t heard anything back from the developer lists, there’s really nowhere else to go with this. Suffice to say, I didn’t renew my ADC account. 
Best,
Keith