I use Scrivener for academic writing, and often get editors requesting revisions to my footnotes. They’re working in Word (alas), so I open my Word document to see what they’re seeing. Like so:
Then I open Scrivener to work on the footnotes in the inspector, like so (using Bookends for my citations):
The difficulty is that while Word numbers footnotes, Scrivener doesn’t. I understand why not; after all, that’s a compile feature.
But you see my difficulty: I’ve opened a 6000±word folder in the Scrivener editor, with 76 footnotes spread across ~8 scrivenings in the Inspector.
What I propose/imagine is a number in brackets after the word “Footnote:” just next to the down-arrow there, at the top of each footnote, saying (for instance) “Footnote (68 of 76):”
Yes, I see your difficulty: Once he clicks on a single scrivening in the Binder, or a range, suddenly all the numbers in the Inspector have to recalculate? While excluding comments? Is he mad?
Actually there is already a feature that should do what you want. Go to Format > Options > Show Compiled Footnote Numbers in Inspector. This does exactly what its says - once you compile, a small number will appear in the inspector footnotes that were included in Compile. They won’t update until you compile again, but this can be useful if you want to refer to the footnotes as they were in a document you compiled for someone else.
That said, in reminding myself of the exact wording of the feature a moment ago, I couldn’t get it working, which seems to indicate that a bug has snuck in there since it was introduced a little while ago (it certainly was working!), so I’ll take a look at this tomorrow to see what is going on.
It turns out that there was a bug whereby this feature would not work if any “front matter” documents were included in the Compile. That is fixed in this beta:
