Hi,
some books has printed informational content on the margins like shown in the image. Is this possible with Scrivener?
No, this isn’t possible in Scrivener, I’m afraid.
All the best,
Keith
How would you manage this? Compile to Latex and do it there?
If Latex suits the remainder of your typesetting needs, then \marginpar seems like an easy solution.
That’s certainly how I would do it, though with one small tweak to how you thinking: you don’t have to do this in LaTeX after you compile—rather, Scrivener can be instructed to generate the syntax you need up front.
Depending on how far along you are with this project, you could try using the LaTeX template in the Non-Fiction category, which is designed to allow you to freely use LaTeX in your writings, while also benefiting Scrivener’s ability to generate a lot of the syntax for you. For example in this case the template has been set up to print inspector comments are margin notes.
On the other hand if you’ve already written a lot of material in a way that wouldn’t be suitable for LaTeX, you could use the MultiMarkdown converter, with one of the supplied compile formats as a starting point. You will probably want to switch on Convert rich text to MultiMarkdown in the general options tab of compile overview. In editing the Format itself, note that in the Annotations pane, we’ve set this up to use CriticMarkup syntax for comments. That will certainly put the note in the margin, but in a stylistic way that is more suitable for proofreading with notes.
Here is some code that might work better in the :
<$lnk>`\marginpar{`{=latex}<$cmt>`}`{=latex}The <$lnk> placeholder is the part you highlight in the main editor. We want to just print that as normal text. Following that is the marginpar command, with some MMD syntax around it to make sure it ends up in the output the way you type it. The <$cmt> placeholder inputs the inspector comment text.
Comments aren’t the only way to do this of course. If you’d prefer to use comments for what they are meant to be used for, rather than as margin note generators, then consider using Styles instead. A good example to follow is the “Index Key” style, provided in any of the LaTeX compile formats. You can have the compiler wrap the marginpar command around any text in the editor using styles.