I’m new to Scrivener, and I am enjoying it so far. I’ve been a long-time Latex user, and I like the idea of being able to write content in Scrivener and then export it to Latex for the final layout–being able to scan my text without having to read through all the Latex formatting for environments and font styles has been fantastic.
Except I’m losing my bold and italics when I compile to Latex. Everything else works–and, ironically, italics is preserved in footnotes (but not in main text). I’m not using styles, I’m just using the ctl-i and ctl-b text italic and text bold settings for a few words here and there in a larger paragraph.
I feel like I am missing something obvious since I cannot find any post that seem to address my issue (or my Google skills need work). Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I figured out my answer. Scrivener doesn’t export rich text features to markdown. So to get those things into markdown (and thus Latex), I have to use markdown syntax for them. Slightly strange that footnotes work differently than body text; but not problematic.
Definitely have a look at Chapter 21 in the user manual, which goes over what will and will not convert, and the rationale as to why (start at §21.4 to skip past the “what is Markdown” stuff). Using Scrivener to work with markup, if one is not inclined to simply write in plain-text markup, is much more about using proper styles rather than raw and difficult to interpret formatting.
We can make something look like a block quote, but how can a machine know that is what we mean by it? But if we use a style, and then set our compile settings to interpret that style as a block quote environment, then we have a way forward (you will find these in the MultiMarkdown|Pandoc Options compile format option pane). If we make another style that doesn’t have a built-in behaviour, we can go into the compile Format’s Styles pane and have it generate the syntax we want, for us. An example of this is the stock Emphasis style, which in the example compile Formats indeed does put *asterisks* around the marked phrase.
Slightly strange that footnotes work differently than body text; but not problematic.
Yes, there are bugs with inspector footnotes and Markdown export—remnants of a very deep misunderstanding of how Markdown support was meant to be implemented, which were once pervasive and made actually writing with Markdown impossible (all syntax was escaped). Almost everything is cleaned up at this point, but comments and footnotes are still busted.