Hello there.
I’m a professional NF book editor. One of the memoirs I am editing has over 240 footnotes. I love Scrivener on so many levels for Chapter numbering a footnote formatting etc but there is something I really need to be able to do today for a meeting with a fellow editor/proofreader/researcher.
For years I have been aware that after Compiling to Word, my footnotes are locked. I have a proof-reader and editor about to do a job which I simply don’t have time for. But I cannot work on the Scrivener file at the same time as them, so I want them to proof read the foot notes in Word.
Trouble is, as I say, the footnotes when compiled to word are locked. What do I do about this? I am going to be working with this editor a lot.
This is quite urgent. If anyone can tell me if there is something I merely have to toggle to unlock them? Or is there a way of compiling or printing JUST THE FOOTNOTES?
Compile to RTF and persuade them to save to RTF when they’ve done their job?
I use NWP, not Word, and RTF footnotes are not locked for me, so if you have Word, try doing that yourself to see what happens.
N.B. RTF was developed by Microsoft so that Word could interact with text from other processors, so in my many years of experience of sharing files with Word-users (on Windows, and I’m a Mac-user), it opens RTFs with no problem.
I just realised something. It is not that they are locked in fact! It is I can’t remove them. Sometimes, I wish to send an editor just Chapters 1-10 but don’t want to include the footnotes and don’t want to adjust the compile. I just want to remove them in word but I’m not allowed to. However, I just realised now that, although I can’t remove them, I can edit them! So what I will do today at the meet until I work out RTF, is delete all that comes before and give the editor a document with only footnotes.
Argh I just deleting everything before but that deletes the footnotes so I’m back to square one. How to compile just the footnotes. Are you able to just compile or create a doc with ONLY the footnotes?
The trick to make this approach work is to export them so they are not actually endnotes/footnotes, but rather text that has been formatted and numbered to look like such things:
Open File ▸ Compile... and double-click on the Format you are using in the left sidebar to edit it. I would also consider right-clicking on it and duplicating it, first, so that you can give it a separate name like “Footnote proofing”. This will make it easier to avoid accidentally forget about the setting later on.
In the Compatibility tab, at the very bottom, tick the Flatten footnotes and comments into regular text.
Thank you, AmberV. I’m a tad confused by this. I ended up doing a work around because I hadnt yet seen this message. My concern was that I only want to send the proofreader the footnotes, not the 70,000 word book. The work around I did was compiling entire book. Saving it as text. Deleting the book before the footnotes. Then using bullet points to renumber them. Next time, will try your method. Thank you again
