And thatās probably the missing key to your problem. Everyone else has been doing their testing using English,
Iāll have a go after weāve got over Christmas itselfātoday is not the day to spend time on it!āto see if I can reproduce the problem, If I can itāll be over to Keith.
Mark
I just uploaded a new video with English-only text: dropbox.com/s/kio9pugerfygg ā¦ 3.mov?dl=0
As per Amberās suggestion, to be honest, itād be quite a hustle, and exhausting, for me to manually select portion of text every time.
You can get round this by copying a footnote marker, pasting it, and then editing the footnote itself. You can have 100 or more on a single line, if you want, even in Chinese.
That may be true and give the OP an apparent work-around, However, it would be good to try and find out the root of the problem using the footnote marker normally by Ctrl-Cmd-8.
Mark
I had a look through the video, and it seems for example at ~37secs there are 9 footnotes and you try to add a footnote to an existing sentence fragment and it selects the existing footnote instead. ~16 secs and ~49 secs are other examples.
But Iāve tried every position multiple times at the start, end, middle, with spaces before / spaces after, middle of a word and I still canāt reproduce thisā¦
Please share a project where you can trigger this, perhaps another setting or a font or something is interacting to cause this?
In my second video, I actually used the project you shared, the one with Du Fuās poem.
Hereās the project file for the third video.
fn bug 3.scriv.zip (43.2 KB)
I can add footnotes without problems in āfn bug 3.scrivā, so it canāt be a project setting. Try to use āHelveticaā font in your project and see if it helps (your video shows Merriweather). Then try to reset your Scrivener preferences to the default (save them first then reset), and restart Scrivener and try. Failing that, create a new system user, log out of your user account and log into that new account and try there. That should test if it is dependent on a preference or system configuration somewhere elseā¦
In a default setting with English-only text and English-US IME, the only way I can reproduce the problem is to add a footnote, then add another one right behind it with no space between them. Hereās the screen record under the default setting: dropbox.com/s/sibk7p2trgur2 ā¦ 4.mov?dl=0
Note that, in this case, a space between two asterisks seems to be the factor that makes a difference.
Will try the new account approach later.
Untitled.scriv.zip (49.9 KB)
Tried to reproduce the failed FN at 13secs in your latest video, and it still works for me:
But we are getting closer to the find the problem, footnotes with an intervening space between them + mysteryāfactorāX 
So you can add a footnote after āwhoā. Like jinxray, I canāt (neither in the sample project nor any other project on my Mac using a similar pattern of footnotes).
Have been switching settings on and off, but canāt find a culprit so far.
I noticed I couldnāt insert footnotes inside words, so the spaces made no difference.
For me, this was fixed by going to Apple > System Preferences > Trackpad and deselecting Tap to click. Footnotes then work perfectly. Strangely, even after reselcting Tap to click, they still work as they should.
But if anyone else is using a trackpad, the solution above might work.
Well, this sure isā¦odd.
Anyway, I think I have come to a simple workaround: change the footnote marker from a single asterisk to an asterisk and a spaceā¦ and itās seems to be working so far.
Now Iām crossing my fingers and hope it wonāt mess the thing up with a bunch of unwanted spaces.
Iām re-opening this thread as I have just had a bit of time to set up a project in Chinese to test it. I copied some Chinese text I have in another project and then set about creating random inspector footnotes. Firstly, as I suspected, the problem is almost certainly triggered when using Pinyin input, so all of you others, even though the text in your editor was in Chinese, if your input system was English, not Chinese, I can well believe you didnāt encounter it.
What I discovered in my test project, which consists of lots of short paragraphs, is that the situation is perhaps even more complex and worrying. I havenāt even got as far as 15 footnotes because:
(1) If there is already a footnote in a given paragraph, Ctrl-Cmd-8 does not create a new footnote, but takes you to the text of the existing footnote, highlighting it all for removal or editing. On the other hand, with the cursor in a subsequent paragraph, Ctrl-Cmd-8 creates a new footnote as expected.
(2) If I go back and modify the text of a much earlier footnote, then move the cursor to a different paragraph which already has a footnote, it behaves like (1) but goes to the text of the footnote that has just been edited.
(2) If I go back and modify the text of a much earlier footnote, then take the cursor down to a new paragraph below all the ones with footnotes, sometimes the new footnote is created immediately after the one just edited, but sometimes it is created where it should be.
So, @jinxray, can you confirm if you also see this behaviour.
Incidentally, having done all that, if I then switch languages to English, and try to enter a new footnote, it still misbehaves.
I will see if I have enough text to insert more than 15 footnotes, but for the moment, my time is up.
Mark
Hi Mark,
Yes, I think you were describing the problem right, and it has nothing to do with the amount of the footnotes.
What I can say with absolute certainty at the moment is that the problem was triggered by the lack of space between the current insert point and the nearest old footnote. And thatās why itās happening almost solely in Chinese text, because itās a language that normally doesnāt involve spaces.
Note that I was trying out a makeshift fix simply by adding a space after the asterisk in the āfootnote markerā setting, now my markers look something like this. I can confirm that the extra space solved the problem, so far I have added some 70 notes with no problem.
Hope it helps.
Hi,
Thanks for your answer. I had read your previous post saying that you had solved the problem by putting a (invisible, following @brideyās suggestion?) space after the marker, but having said Iād look into it further, I felt I should do so. I am not a fluent Chinese writer, but I do use Scrivener in Chinese as I collaborate with a number of Chinese translator friends, so in that respect I felt I could match your experience more closely.
Perhaps Keith will pick up this thread again, but whether he can do anything to solve the underlying problem or not, I have no idea. I guess it will depend on whether the footnote marker code is his code, or provided by the black box of Appleās text-kit.
I have just thought of another test I could make; Iāll do that and post back.
Mark
Me again! 
While I was writing my last post, I thought to myself that one test I could do was to see how NWP handles footnotes in Chinese text. NWP is based on the same text engine as Scrivener, though Nisus have modified it far more than Keith has. As I couldnāt remember whether Iād ever used footnotes extensively in Chinese texts in NWP, I compiled my test project to RTF and opened it in NWP. I then started adding footnotes in sentences which already had footnotes from the Scrivener project.
In NWP, I found I could add new footnotes like that, or anywhere in the text without problem, and that the numbering reflected the changes properlyāthe only issue being the style of the number references in the footnotes as they are styled non-superscripted in my NWP stylesheet, whereas the compiled reference numbers from Scrivener are superscripted.
So clearly, Nisus have found a way to put footnote markers between characters in a string without requiring a space, so, with any luck, when he has time, Keith might find the solution.
Mark
EDIT: As a further corollary to this, Iāve just opened my test project in the current beta of Windows Scrivener 3, and it is exhibiting similar problems. Iāll post that in the Windows Beta-testing forum:
Final (I hope) post from me on this. On further experimenting, the solution is the one @jinxray found. I donāt know if s/he has tried compiling, but fortunately, although the markers in the Scrivener project include a space, in the compiled text there is no space ā¦ makes sense when you think of it, as the space is part of the marker which is replaced with the footnote number on compiling.
So the issue is solved for the user, at least as far as Iām concerned. If Keith feels he should work out how to set things up so that Chinese (and possibly other languages, particularly Japanese and Korean) users donāt need to include the space in the marker, that is his call.
Mark
Thank you for following this issue with such patience, Mark.
Yes, I had a little test with the compilation result to make sure the solution wonāt mess the final rich text version up with a bunch of unwanted spaces. So far, so good.
But, maybe Iām being paranoid, I do feel uncomfortable with so many ā*+spaceā inserted in my text, and I hope there can be a better way to do it.
Thanks received with pleasure, but not really necessary. 
I wouldnāt be paranoid about it if I were you; just think of it as the footnote marker, and the little extra spaceāthough perhaps you are using Chinese as your interface language and have inserted a Chinese,character-sized space, which would get on my nerves tooāis just a display issue while in Scrivener and is resolved on compiling. This is how it appears on my 13" rMBP screen.
That said, I agree that it would be nice not to have to use this work-around, but itās up to Keith, if he picks up this thread, to decide if and when he wants to try to find a better solution. That it is possible is shown by Nisus Writer Pro, but they have a much bigger team of programmers and are developing a classic word-processor, without the other highly complex features of Scrivener.
Mark
EDIT: Just checked back, and you havenāt used a Chinese space, though the ones in your screenshot looks bigger than mine. I think thatās down to your underlying Roman font. Mine is Adobe Garamond Pro; yours is clearly something different.
