I’m drafting an academic paper in Scrivener. I often need to copy and paste a paragraph or so that contains footnotes from a document in Word. When I paste it to Scrivener, I either loose the footnotes (if I paste and match style) or the footnotes appear as text below the body of the pasted text (but Scrivener doesn’t seem to recognize them as “footnotes”, just as some random text below with some numbers…). i would like to be able to paste from Word and have my footnotes appear in the Inspector, which is how I use it for my draft.
That’s weird. Import & Split and Import/Files works for me (latest version of macOS, Scrivener, and of Word) without any hassle and without having to use .rtf as an intermediate, just with .docx.
Maybe something is not right with the Word document. Did you write it yourself or did you get it somewhere else? If the latter, can you open it in Word, Save as and try again with this copy? And does that change anything?
You could also create a new and very basic Word document including at least one footnote and try Import & Split again.
These steps might help to pinpoint where the problem lies.
As to Copy & Paste from Word: If you have any app that allows you to look at the content of the macOS Clipboard, you will find that the content copied from Word looks exactly like what you get when you paste it into Scrivener. Meaning: Copying from Word already breaks its footnotes (unless you stay in Word, of course. Microsoft is doing its own thing).
The proper way to copy parts of Word documents including their footnotes into Scrivener would be: Import (& maybe split) the whole Word document into Scrivener’s research section and copy the parts, including intact footnotes, from there… with the preparatory step of Import (& Split) working as expected, of course.
@RuthS: Thank you! That works perfectly well. Fantastic.
@suavito: I keep having the problem no matter what. I wrote the Word document myself. And I created a simple Word document (one word, to which there is one footnote attached) and imported it to Scrivener… still no footnotes.
I mean, you don’t have the latest version of Word, which is 16.97 (25051114), but I can’t remember having problems with earlier versions. And your version macOS is obviously not the latest either, but I can’t imagine how the OS could break the importing function in Scrivener.
One last question, just to rule this out: You do save as .docx with Word, not in the old .doc format, don’t you?
Yes, it’s strange. I’ll update Word to see what happens. I’ve tried in my office computer, with run on the latest OS, and I have the same problem. Yes, I’m saving as .docx.
Also, after I pasted some paragraphs from RFT into the file I’m working on, Scrivener started crashing every now and then. Hadn’t happened before.