How do you create a footnote? Make it a step-by-step instruction please. Also, when is the Windows video tutorial going to be posted? It would really be useful.
On the Windows version, footnotes are shown in the editor as text within a coloured bubble, but are printed out in the traditional way when you compile your document.
Briefly, either:
a) Write your ‘normal text’, then type ctl-shift-F to turn footnote mode on, type footnote text, type ctl-shift-F to turn footnote mode off again.
Or
b) Highlight some text and press ctl-shift-F to turn the selected text into a footnote.
In both cases, the footnote text will be in a coloured bubble.
[nb: this is exactly the same process you’ll use to add in-line annotations (comments) except that the shortcut is ctl-shift-A and the bubble is a different colour.]
If you’ve not tried it yet, do the Interactive Tutorial in the Help Menu: it will explain a lot about how the program is designed to work and it will take less than an hour to work through.
For more details on footnotes and annotations, see the manual, Chapter 17.
What if I imported a document to Scrivner which already has the body copy and the footnote test. Can I cut and past the footnote text into the new bubble, or does it have to be re-typed? Also, where can I see how the finished product looks?
Documents with proper footnotes will import with those footnotes intact in Scrivener, so the footnote text will already be in the gray bubble. If you’re adding to a footnote or want to assign other existing text as a footnote, you can just type in the existing footnote bubble or select the text and toggle it to a footnote using the Ctrl-Shift-F shortcut as brookter said. (The actual menu command is Format > Inline Footnote; you can also put a button for this in the format bar.)
What the finished product looks like depends on your compile settings, the format you’re compiling to, and in some cases the program you use to open the compiled document, so the way to see this really is to run compile and view the document. You can adjust some settings for how the notes get exported by opening File > Compile and choosing Footnotes/Annotations from the sidebar on the left (click the blue arrow icon to the right of the “Format As” pop-up to show the sidebar if necessary). Here you can choose, for instance, whether the footnotes get exported as footnotes or as endnotes.