I want to output footnotes into a separate file. When I compile a project for notes only, that is check off only the “notes” box in the formatting tab of the compile dialog, the output starts with “Notes” and some blank lines like this:
Notes
1 Q) The question is
Is there a way to turn off this preface in output so that only the footnotes themselves are present in the output?
To turn off the title, click the “Options” button in the upper right for the formatting pane of compile (just above the table where you’ve ticked off only “Notes”) and then deselect “Insert subtitles between text elements”.
You mention though that you’re trying to compile the footnotes. The “Notes” referred to here are the document notes in the inspector, not footnotes within the text. For the latter, you need to compile the text. If you’re compiling to .rtf or .doc, you could go into the Footnotes/Annotations pane of compile and switch temporarily to compiling the footnotes as endnotes, just so they’re all grouped together for easy editing.
The “Notes” checkmark is for the Document Notes field in the inspector, not for footnotes. I guess, if you un-check the Notes checkmark, you might get footnotes only… but I’m not sure it works when you exclude the text that has footnotes attached to them.
Thanks, turning off title in options did the trick.
As far as notes outputing footnotes, it does. These are the setting I use produce just footnotes.
If you don’t check of text but do check notes, the compiler will produce footnotes. Likewise checking text, whether or not you check notes, will produce footnotes.
I would like to know if checking notes but not checking text producing notes is a documented behavior. The scripts I am producing depend on that behavior. I don’t want it to go away as the result of a future change that fixes something.
The “Notes” column in the formatting table in compile should only affect whether or not the document notes for the included documents are compiled; it has nothing to do with footnotes within the text. This appears to be working correctly, so more detail about what exactly you’re doing and how you’re getting different results would be appreciated! Perhaps we’re just having confusion over the term footnotes? I’m talking specifically about footnotes applied in a document with the Format > Inline Footnote command (or the format bar button or Ctrl-Shift-F), which when compiled will give you the traditional superscript numeral and bottom-of-the-page footnotes. In Scrivener’s editor, the footnotes appear by default in a gray bubble:
Document notes are displayed in the bottom of the inspector, to the right of the editor. These are what the “Notes” column should be toggling for compile.
So yes, getting just footnotes via the “Notes” column is undocumented and unintentional. Could you let me know how you’re setting up your documents and the compile options to accomplish that?
Text was inserted with ctrl-shift-F. Here is the input text and the preview output the compile command produces.
And you can’t see it in the screen shot, but the none of the text boxes are checked.
Thanks, got it now. This isn’t occurring for all formats, although it does seem to be a bug with many of them. You’ll notice also that only footnotes in documents that also contain document notes are getting compiled.
So yes, this is a bug; “Notes” should only be compiling the document notes, not the footnotes. Thanks for the catch!
I assume the fix for this will remove that “feature”. Still, for me I would like to be able to output just the footnotes.
The reason I want to do this is as follows.
I’m using Scrivener to write the scripts I use to do voice overs of video courses for programmers that I create. As part of the course I include a set of multiple choice questions that the user can use to test their comprehension of what they have viewed.
The questions always contain a reference to the part of the video that contains the correct answer, so the viewer can refresh their comprehension if they get the wrong answer. The easiest way to create the questions is inline with the text in the script that provides the answer, because it shows me exactly where in the script the answer is.
I would like to extract these multiple choice questions from the script into a separate file that in the end is used by an application that presents the test. And I also want to be able to output the script with out the questions in it because that makes it much easier to read when I am recording the voice over.
You can do this is using annotations, rather than footnotes. Like footnotes, annotations are inline and can be easily removed from the compiled document. (For some formats you also get a choice of how they are compiled when you do include them; for Word .doc files, for instance, you can choose to compile them as comments or even as footnotes or endnotes.) They also however have the option to be exported from the project on their own, using File > Export > Export Annotations. This will create a single .rtf file with all the annotations, either from the entire project or just from the selected documents, and you can choose to also include the document titles to give some extra context. (If you don’t want the titles for your purposes, you can leave that option unchecked.)
That’s a workable solution but I’ll have to do some post processing to the rtf file to get the format I want. I was hoping to be able to push as much of my workflow as possible into Scrivener.
Hmmmm, I’ve got to take back my previous post. It’s really not that workable a solution. I certainly could parse the .rtf file to get the format I want. It would actually be easier to parse Word .xdoc files though. So I’ve got to re-think how to get Scrivener to work for me.
If you explained what you want, and how that’s different from what you’re getting, I bet someone more conversant in inline comments could help you figure things out.
I’m want to embed inline metadata that I can later easily extract from the text output that Scrivener produces. Ideally Scrivener would do the extracting for me.
The scripts I write contain text the voice over for the video courses I make.
However I also need to keep track of test for comprehension questions and images and videos that are part of the course. Embedding these as inline metadata in the script keeps track of where they go in the final video.
After I record the voice overs I need to generate a file that contains all the test for comprehension questions. The actual course video is broken up into typically 3-8 minute clips. I don’t know where the clip breaks will be when I write the script, I figure that out as I edit the video. But I need to know where in the script the question was so I can add a reference to it back to the clip that contains the correct answer to the test for comprehension question.
When I am editing the final video I refer to the inline metadata to sync up the images/video I have with the voice over.
I also want the text for the actual voice over to contain only the voice text and not of the meta data.
I would like to push as much of this workflow into Scrivener as I could rather than write some custom tools that post process the output of Scrivener.
I like the way Scrivener keeps track of pieces of text and can easily output different formats of the same document. I currently use Word to do this this sort of thing in an ad hoc manual fashion. I’m trying to automate the busy work I have to go through to produce a video and at first glance Scrivener looks like it would be an easy way for me to do that.
I could write some tools to post process Word… I’ve done this in past for books I’ve written to manage figures the way Addison Wesley wanted. However I find Scrivener is much more “comfortable” to use than Word which is why I’m trying to find a way to get it to work for me.
Scrivener’s modular format along with a compiler seems like I should be able to do this. I haven’t given up yet…
What format are you trying to compile to? I guess I’m a little confused here because this started off using footnotes, and I’m not quite sure why the annotation options aren’t satisfying your needs. They can be excluded from compile, allowing you to get a clean script without the meta-data for the initial recording; they can be included in the text compile so that you get the text and the meta-data together, allowing you to see where specifically they go in the script. Since you’re working with Word anyway, it seems like compiling to .rtf or .doc would make this even simpler, since you could compile with the annotations coming in as Word comments (they do by default, but this is set in the Footnotes/Annotations pane in Compile), and then just toggle the comment view on or off in Word.
Regarding the Extract Annotations feature in Scrivener, that was for gathering all the comments together in a single document, as you said:
It’s not going to give you the specific reference to the script that compiling the comments with the text will, so it might not be sufficient–even including titles will only narrow the focus rather than pinpointing the exact placement, and that’s assuming that you compile your main document with the titles as section heads or such. However, depending what you’re really after here with the formatting, you could again just go straight to Word with the comments and then use a macro there to extract the comments and include more of the scope, the page number, etc.
Anyway, I apologize if it sounds like I’m just beating the point; I appreciate that you haven’t been able to get what you need yet, and I’m just still trying to understand specifically what you’re after as far as the actual compiled files.
I’m writing scripts but for instructional videos I produce.
For example I want to input text like:
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Q) question1
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah img : foo.png blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Q) question2
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Note that the second section of blah’s has an annotation (img: foo.png) in it.
I want to be able to generate files that look like (as plain text, it is an input to a program):
test for comprehension questions:
Q) question1
voice over text:
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah [the file foo.png appears in the video here] blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
I was using footnotes and annotations as a way to segregate test for comprehension questions from notes about where images appear in the video.
If possible I would like Scrivener to produce the output formats I want without having to do any post processing.
As I mentioned earlier Scrivener has a modular approach to text and a compiler so it seems like it should let me do what I would like to do. Also Scrivener is just, as I said, more comfortable to work with than Word.
The advantage of Word is that it is incredibly generic with an documented xml format that is pretty easy to parse and pull apart to do post processing. The disadvantage is the for all practical purposes you must work with on monolithic file. It’s hard to combine a lot of diverse sources of info or to outline what you want to write. The synopsis in Scrivener is really powerful.
I’m writing scripts for the videos I produce. There are a ton a bits and pieces that have to be integrated with that script to make the final deliverables. Just producing a script in Word format isn’t enough, it has to fit into a workflow part of which involves editing video to synchronize the video with the script.
But I’ll keep poking to see if that workflow is there.
I may be way off beam here, so please forgive me if I’ve misunderstood what you want, but can’t you just use Search Results / collections to do what you’ve outlined in the post above. I.e.
a) Firstly, place each set of questions in its own document, so that you have a block of text in one document, following by the associate question in the next document, repeated to the end. I.e.
[Doc 1] blah blah blah
[Q1] Q) question1
[Doc 2] blah blah blah
[Q2] Q) question1
You can still edit the whole (or part) of the text as a block using scrivenings mode and it won’t affect the normal process of compilation when you want the produce the entire document.
b) Add a marker to each ‘question’ type document, such as a specific status or label (you can create one for this purpose), or a particular word in the Document Notes field.
c) Use Project Find (limiting it to your specific status / label / word) to pull up all the Questions into Search Results
d) Compile the document but in the Contents panel, choose Search Results from the drop down menu. You then produce your ‘Questions only’ document, and apply any of the normal compilation options (e.g. whether to print titles or not) to it.
I may be missing something, but this seems to do what you’ve asked for in your latest post, without needing footnotes or annotations at all.
Thanks, I didn’t know I could do that.
I’ve have given your suggestion a try out but it really breaks up the flow of the document. I really want to have the question right in the flow of text, it just makes it easier to make sure the question/text fit together properly.
That’s the reason I was using annotations/footnotes.
With the question in a separate document I would have to switching back and forth between windows or setting of some kind of triple spit window to get that effect.
I think the issue with inline annotations is that they can’t be separated into their own compile. Dan apparently wants JUST the questions posed in the annotations/footnotes, and not the main text, as the output. Is that it?
Dan
The way I’m suggesting doesn’t break the flow of the text at all: the program is designed to do this i.e. to divide texts into ‘chunks’ (i.e individual Scrivener documents) which are then compiled into the final output document. The size of the chunks can vary according to your needs. For some, one chunk per chapter is enough. For others, one chunk per scene or section. Some even have one chunk per paragraph. Here, it feels like your division should be functional, between ‘text’ and ‘questions’. NB you can see the text of more than one chunk in the editor at once, so there’s no need to have more than one window open at once. See below for more details…)
To recreate your Blah example… Have 5 individual documents in the Binder, all at the same level:
Blah 1
Q1
Blah 2
Q2
Blah 3
Select any one document in the Binder and you’ll only see that specific text. Select all five documents and you’ll see all their text combined, separated by a black line (which won’t be printed out). You can edit and format the text in this mode, so functionally, it’s just one long ‘virtual’ document. This is called Scrivenings mode and it’s one of the most useful features of the whole program. You could of course choose just to edit all the text, or all the questions together simply by selecting just those elements.
(This is from the Mac version, but it works the same way in Windows.)
Then when you need to compile, you just choose to do it for the whole document in the normal way, or you choose to compile just the questions as I outlined before.
Again, apologies if I’ve misunderstood. (If you haven’t, you may want to have a look at the Tutorial which explains such things in more detail.)
