I’m in law school and I’ve been using Scrivener as my base of operations for class notes/response papers and a fairly decent sized research paper. While the program was worthwhile for the ease of managing PDFs, class notes, and quick 5 page responses, I wouldn’t have created an account on this forum just for that functionality.
Rather, I just ran the search function on my research project and found every reference I needed instantly. Not particularly novel, maybe, but as someone who has written dozens of papers using handwritten notes this bordered on an epiphany. I’ve been diligently plugging in research notes and PDF files of articles, and this is the first time that my niggling suspicion that Scrivener would radically change the way work was confirmed. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out my handwriting and digging through stacks of paper–forgetting my ideas–that this is night and day.
Not to mention that having notecards open with ideas, sources, etc. has allowed me to keep a macro view of project even as I dig into the details; that I can use notecards to really develop a skeleton of the project while developing detailed outlines within the files, etc. etc.
Again, none of this stuff is revolutionary. But, I’ve tried to find progs like Scrivener for windows for my friends and I can’t. I think about it, and this is best organic work environment I’ve had and pulling that together really is something…
So, now that I’ve boosted your ego a little, anyway you could add separate footnotes to Scriv They could be in a separate window, they don’t need to be WYSIWYG like Word. But, with the way law articles have 5-10 footnotes a page, all generally quite lengthy, my clean full screen view will be a sea of grey and pulling together coherent thoughts might be tough. I’ll try this paper in Scriv, but I might have to run over to a different app with footnotes outside the body of the text.
Any rate, awesome work and now that I’ve shown my appreciation for Scriv (which as I told my ex, is the sexiest thing I’ve seen since I left her), back to work.