I’m looking for a way to make footnotes display as part of the main text in both composition mode as well as in the standard Scrivener window (whatever it’s called). I want black footnote text on the white background right there in front of me on the same page as the main text – no gray bubbles or panels on the side. I’m writing my doctoral thesis in history and footnotes matter a great deal. I refer to them constantly during the process of writing and need to see them spelled out in full at the bottom of each page, just like I do in Microsoft Word. I also want to see footnote numbers displayed automatically (again as they do in MS Word).
In a word, I want to see footnotes display during the process of writing exactly as they will look when I print.
I’m relatively new to Scrivener and love its features for organizing and composing, but if I cannot find a way to use MS Word-style footnotes, I will abandon the program without hesitation. It matters that much. Can anyone offer some help?
The whole idea of Scrivener is to enable you to get the content right: it has some wysiwig features, but it was never meant to be a final layout tool. It’s assumed that for all but simple documents you will probably want to tweak the final arrangement in something like Word anyway.
So, if you really really must see the footnotes as they’ll appear in the final document (although hundreds of academics and other users of footnotes manage to use the system as it is), then Scrivener won’t be enough.
Though I’m intrigued: what’s the difference between a footnote at the bottom of the page and one that’s visible in the sidebar when it comes to ease of reference?
This is not possible in Scrivener. For what it is worth, I, and several others who frequent these forums, have written doctoral theses using Scrivener. I shall be doing more research and writing in history and psychology, and I will certainly be using Scrivener to do that. So I would humbly suggest that you reconsider – in my case I found that the organisational capabilities of Scrivener are too useful to be abandoned, and they far outweigh any shortcomings when it comes to footnotes. (I use Inspector Notes – I find Inline Notes completely unusable myself.) I find that glancing at a panel to the side is actually better than scrolling to the bottom of the page to find a footnote, so I don’t find that a problem, but if you want to refer to footnotes by number while you are writing your main text, that does throw up difficulties.