Footnotes appear at the end of each chapter when the texts are compiled and saved as a PDF file. I would like to place footnotes at the end of each page. How can I achieve that?
At this time the PDF engine is not capable of producing the complex layout requirements needed for placing footnotes at the bottom of the page. It is thus not suitable for producing final quality documents that need end-of-page notes, and one should use software that does this sort of layout, such as Word or OpenOffice (the latter comes with good PDF output, and I believe Word does as well in recent versions).
Oh, I see…Cheers.
I just found out my WPS(a Chinese software like Word) can place footnotes at the bottom of pages even after it is compiled and saved as a PDF. I guess there can be a way for Scrivener to do so, but just don’t know how.
Well, it’s not a matter of it being impossible, I would not say that. It is just complex to compute how footnotes should be formatted at the bottom of the page. There are many contingencies and edge-cases that arise around notation styles, such as when a footnote is longer than half of the entire page and must run to subsequent pages, or when there are too many notes for one page to display, when notes are notes of notes, and so on and the various recalculation and recursive pagination that must be done when these cases are met. We could program a layout engine to handle all of these contingencies, but given that Scrivener was never designed to be a production output tool, that seems like an awful lot of effort for something that is outside of its purpose. We would rather spend our time improving the writing tools and adding new features that enhance the creative work.
For a word processor on the other hand, which ostensibly is designed purely for the production of documents (rather than the texts that go into documents), it would be a pretty big thing to leave out. So it is understandable that you have found a word processor that can.
One minor possibility does remain, and that is if we can find a suitable engine to delegate this process to. We have yet to really find such a beast. The Mac version can integrate with a Java utility that produces end-of-page footnotes, but it has other problems which make it unsuitable for production output—so the problem isn’t really solved there, either.
Ha ha! It’s no big deal. I can save it as rtf, and use other processors to save it as PDF that can keep footnotes at the bottom of the page. After all, there’s no perfect software.
Thank you for your time and effort. It helps a lot.