In the past I used Emacs with AucTeX to write my documents using LaTeX syntax directly. Now I’d like to switch to Scrivener, especially because of the organization features it provides. So I will write my text in MultiMarkdown and export it to LaTeX.
I was thrilled when I found out, that Scrivener exports Linked Footnotes to MultiMarkdown syntax. This is very nice since I find it very hard to read the text in case of inline footnotes - or hard to handle in case of a MultiMarkdown-like syntax. So I’d love to use Linked Footnotes. But on Fletscher Penney’s Website I found this:
So, what does this mean? Can’t I rely on that feature? And does anyone have experiences how robust the export feature of Linked Footnotes is?
Yes, you can rely on it - I’m the developer so I know it works, and that if any problems arise I fix them as I’m made aware of them. The linked footnotes will be converted to correct MMD syntax during the export process, before it is piped through to create a LaTeX file if necessary.
I’m not sure why Fletcher makes that recommendation - possibly so that you can read the MMD syntax through and manually check for errors. For instance, I suppose it is possible that in certain situations you might have MMD syntax with a footnote in the middle and, because the footnote is hidden away, then you might not have taken it into account and could miss it if the MMD formatting around it needs to consider its presence. I don’t know if there are any situations like that, but I’m guessing that’s the sort of thing he means when he says that it’s easier to debug, simply because you could see the syntax present and account for it rather than have it created for you. But there is nothing inherently unreliable in the footnotes themselves - the linked footnotes feature is as robust as the inline footnotes feature and all footnotes get converted properly to MMD syntax during compile.
All I ever use is Scrivener’s footnotes. For me it’s the same as headers, a task that would otherwise require a lot of organisation to do right; keeping track of reference names, creating them in the first place, typing in all of those [^d] things everywhere—why bother? You get the same exact result with the footnote feature and never once have to worry about a collision.
And if you need to debug, anyway, it’s far better to compile a plain MMD file and analyse that for flaws, rather than try to derive where the flaws might be coming from in Scrivener. Errors are usually given line numbers, those line numbers are from the MMD file and are of little use in Scrivener. Looking at an MMD file means you are looking at plain syntax footnotes—any problems will jump out, if that is where they are.