Importing comments through OPML?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’m starting to use Scrivener for a large research project (yes, a PhD). I tend to do the early stages of writing in Tinderbox and up to now have been exporting to LaTeX. However, this isn’t working so well because of difficulties with citation styles and messy conversion from LaTeX to Word, so I am moving to Scrivener and exporting to RTF. That seems to work fine, so far.

However, there is one thing that I used to do in LaTeX that I can’t work out how to do in Scrivener. In Tinderbox, when I know that I am exporting to LaTeX, it’s easy to add comments in the text (either \todo{} with the appropriate package loaded or a simple %) for little notes to myself about things that I want to deal with later so that I don’t derail the train of writing.

Is there a way to mark text in the OPML output that Tinderbox will produce so that Scrivener will read these as comments? That way, my notes-to-self will survive from one tool to another. It would also be useful to be able to create footnotes this way.

(To be clear, I’m not asking how to create comments in Scrivener itself, but how to ‘pre-create’ them in text which will be imported into it.)

2

Hi,

No, there’s no way of doing this. The OPML format is very basic - it is essentially an XML format that supports plain text only. I’d have to extend the format dramatically to support things like this, in ways that aren’t used by other programs.

Hmm, actually, there is a way you can do this, come to think of it - officially, it’s unsupported, because it relies on a way Scrivener stores inline footnote information internally, but it works. You could wrap each footnote in “{\Scrv_fn=” and “\end_Scrv_fn}”, like this:

[code]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Untitled [/code]

This will result in an inline footnote in Scrivener. You could then convert any such footnotes to inspector footnotes using Format > Convert > Inline Footnotes to Inspector Footnotes.

All the best,
Keith