I’m generally speaking a Mac user and have loved using Scrivener on those machines, but I recently purchased a cheap laptop for work on the go and, of course, downloaded Scrivener for it. I’m an academic, so I use a lot of footnotes and I’ve noticed that the footnotes I created on my mac do not appear in the windows version. I saw on the version difference post that the windows version does not support the inspector footnotes function, but does support inline footnotes. So I have three questions about this issue:
Is there anyway to view the inspector footnotes I created on my Mac when viewing the project on my Windows machine? When I try to compile the project into a pdf, they do not appear.
Will those footnotes be preserved if I make changes to the project on my Windows machine and then open the project back up on my Mac? (Really, the essential question).
Will any inline footnotes I create on my Windows machine be preserved and/or become inspector footnotes when I open the project on my mac?
My Mac machines at home and in the office will remain my primary PCs, so really so long as the footnotes are preserved when I open up the project in Windows, the problem really will only be a minor annoyance than anything major. Thanks for any information!
If you intend to use Scrivener in a cross-platform manner, then it really doesn’t make sense to try and use inspector notes right now. The latest version for Windows will display the highlighted zone in the document, and if you hold the mouse over the zone it will print the note in a tooltip, but you can’t edit it or interact with it in any way, and it won’t compile (the latter not really being a problem if the Mac remains your primary).
They will be preserved, provided you do not delete the word the note is anchored to of course. On the Mac if you need to alter the word the note is linked to, you can move the note aside, change it, and then move it back—but since you can’t interact with it, you won’t be able to make changes to any linked anchor text either.
What you might want to do is, on your Mac, go into the project and assemble a Scrivenings session on your entire draft. Click into the editor, and then use Format/Convert/Inspector Footnotes to Inline Footnotes; and then the same for comments to annotations if necessary. Inline notation is fully cross-platform compatible (with the exception of inline annotation colouring). They will just all look red (or whatever your preference is set to) on Windows. Anyway, that’s just my opinion—I’d rather not intentionally hamper my ability to edit any word in the project, but then again I prefer inline notation for most things, so perhaps I’m less inclined to be bothered by giving up sidebar notes.
Thanks. I think you’re right about just using inline footnotes for consistency. I was not happy when footnotes started disappearing as I was using my Windows PC. But I also find inline footnotes really distracting, especially considering how many I will be using.
So yeah, for the record, inspector annotations would be a great feature for the windows version of Scrivener.