I have an article with a number of footnotes, placed in Scrivener by Bookends {Author, #}.
My question is - Does Scrivener export footnotes more consistent with Mellel or with Nisus Writer Pro? Mellel’s footnotes are actually “objects” that Bookends uses to generate the actual notes; Nisus footnotes are place holders {Author, #} that Bookends uses. I recognize Mellel’s peculiarity in this, but it is easier to generate footnotes from Bookends in Mellel. But if Scrivener simply exports as text, then I’m guessing NWP is the best option.
The command ‘Convert Text to Citations…’ in Mellel is designed to deal with exactly this situation. It converts citations of the form you posted (i.e. in text, with some sort of delimiting brackets) into proper Mellel citation objects. You just run the command once when you bring the file exported from Scrivener into Mellel. It’s under Edit>Bibliography.
By the way, it’s not relevant whether your citations are in footnotes or in the main body of the text.
I can’ tell you which word processor is better because I only use Mellel. And Mellel is not perfect with importing—wether footnotes or not—as you might know.
But I use all three combined, Scrivener, Mellel and Bookends and it is very simple.
You just have to make an additional step in Mellel: You have to convert the text-footnotes in the delimiters you chose in Bookends (default is { and }) into citation objects first.
You find this command not in the bibliography palette but in the dropdown menu: Edit/Bibliography/Convert Text Into Citations. (Because I use Mellel with a German interface their English names might actually differ).
You do this once and then have citation objects the same you have when you work with Mellel and Bookends directly.
I’m a Scrivener, Bookends and Nisus Writer Pro user. I started with Mellel and there was much I liked about it, but it was completely useless at importing docs in Chinese, so when I found Nisus Writer, or rather it’s predecessor Opito Composer, I switched to that.
Mellel got there first in terms of allowing you to deal with Bookends citations from within the app, rather than having to scan the RTF file with Bookends, but for some time now, Nisus Writer Pro — I’m not sure about Nisus Writer Express — has come with built-in macros for working directly with Bookends. So do take a look at that.
Apart from interface differences, my understanding is that NWP handles RTF, comments and footnotes from Scrivener better than Mellel, but on the other hand, Mellel seems to handle mixed footnotes and/or endnotes — created within Mellel — better, and it seems to be the case that a lot of long footnotes in Nisus slows it down significantly, something that they’re working on at the moment.
So I’d give them both a try, and see which suits you better. Certainly to my mind, Scrivener and NWP go together like strawberries and a not-too-dry Alsace Gewürztraminer.
