I use annotation as a way of leaving notes to myself, which are stripped out during the compile phase. But annotation and footnotes don’t seem to live very well with one another. So, for example, if I select a paragraph that includes an inspector footnote and then click “Inline Annotation”, the annotation is not applied. I get around this by defining a paragraph style from an annotation; when I apply that style, the annotation is applied to the entire paragraph, including the footnote. [This sort of inconsistent behavior may be a bug, but whatever]. However, there’s no good way to remove an annotation like that. Hitting “Inline Annotation” again doesn’t work, and any ‘regular’ style (one that isn’t defined through an annotation) also doesn’t remove the annotation. I endup copying and pasting parts of the paragraph, and then the footnote, all independently. But that’s a hassle.
Any ideas about how to apply/remove annotation for selections with inspector footnotes?
Thanks for the suggestion, Rob. Comments won’t work for me. I also use this mechanism to track “deletions” – that is, bits of text that I don’t want to show in the compiled version, but that I’m not comfortable deleting, or even moving away form their location in the text. I can cut and paste the text into a comment, sure. But I’d rather keep the “deletion” in the main text window (not in the inspector), so I can see exactly what I’ve modified. (Often, I just delete clauses in sentences, or adjectives, keeping them in the main text lets me easily compare how the text would read with/without them. Once the text moves to the inspector, that’s a little less perspicacious.
Really, I think the issue is just that the annotations function doesn’t apply well to footnotes. I’m not sure if this is a feature or a bug, so was wondering what other people do. I will experiment some with comments, but I don’t think they’ll fit what I do…
Out of curiosity, what happens if you convert the inspector footnote into an inline footnote?
My guess, regarding this issue, is that it’s kind of like trying to put emphasis tags into an href, like this … Not so much a “design decision” as a limitation of the markup parsing routines. But that’s just a guess.
As for what I’d do, I would rely on snapshots more. You can see what the text looked like when you took any give snapshot, and can also see a “diff” of the changes between an snapshot and your current text with the click of a button. You can drag a snapshot into an editor pane’s header to see it side-by-side with your current text, or just widen the inspector pane (using the keyboard shortcuts for zooming text as needed).
Hang on … what do you mean “a paragraph that includes an inspector footnote”? Are you saying that you highlight a whole paragraph and use that as your footnote anchor?
Have you tried setting the footnote marker in “Project > Project Settings… > Editor”—I think that’s the right menu chain—because I regularly use footnotes and inspector comments without problem. Inline annotations shouldn’t be a problem either, if you use the footnote marker.
If I select the entire paragraph (including the footnote mark), and turning it into an “Inline Annotation” is not available.
However, if if select the entire paragraph (including footnote), and apply a character style that makes that selected text an annotation, it does work. (I get that style by defining the style through a bit of text that is already an annotation). It looks like this:
And it behaves like an annotation. If, for example, the compile stage strips annotations, the whole paragraph is stripped, including the footnote and comment.
However, there is no direct way to un-annotate this paragraph. When I select it, the “inline annotation” command is greyed out, and applying other styles will not remove the annotation.
Ah, OK, the screenshots help a lot, though I personally don’t see why you need the whole paragraph including the footnote marker as the comment marker.
I would leave the footnote marker outside the comment marker, which should resolve the problem I think. I had something like this several years ago—though it might have been in Nisus Writer Pro, which is based on the same text engine—and it turned out to be a problem with nested links as @rdale suggested.
On the other hand, if you put your cursor over the margin comment, an ‘x’ appears, which deletes the comment and it’s marker for me. Do you do that before trying to change the paragraph style?
I hope I don’t sound patronising; I’m just trying to help you find a solution.
The behavior you describe with your “annotation”-paragraph style is quite odd. It sounds to me like you have encountered a bug — that you then can’t unapply the style or overwrite it with another.
Why don’t you make your own style from scratch (it is easy to set it to put that line around the selection and tint the background), instead of defining it from an actually bit of annotated text? You would thereby avoid the pathology you’re seeing and be able to add/remove such styling at will in the way you expected.
Thanks, Xiamenese and GR. The purpose of applying the annotation (not a comment) in this way is to remove the text during the compile stage. So I very much would like to include the footnote, and to have the style based on an annotation. No worries, though. I suspect this is just a bug in handling annotations, which results from too many nesting in the underlying markup, as people have suggested. I will deal with it.
But it does not need to be based on annotation in order to remove it at compile time.
Open for editing your chosen Compile setting and look in the Style area. You can pick/specify your chosen style there and click the ‘Delete text of this Style’ checkbox!
Another possibility is using the strikethrough character attribute. (Format->Font->Strikethrough or shift-cmd-_ ) Not only does the text look deleted, but you can delete it from the Compile General Options tab so you need not modify any compile format.
Report: defining a different character style that is stripped out during compile doesn’t work. If a portion of text contains an inspector footnote, and if that entire text (including footnote) is marked with the character set that is stripped out during compile, the regular text is stripped out, but the footnote is not.
Maybe you can still craft whatever standoutishness you want with that by defining a Struck! character style which has enabled the color background and outline feature. If you are lucky, Silverdragon’s great suggestion for removal at compile time via the strike-through attribute will still work.
Just to report, in case anyone is interested: strikeouts can apply to footnotes in a way that “styles” cannot. So, for example, if strikeouts are removed during compile, one can strikeout a footnote marker and the footnote is removed. Importantly, one can ‘unstrike’ a footnote marker in exactly the same way. This was the main issue when using annotations as the mechanism through which to remove text during compile: you can make an inspector footnote an annotation using a “style”, but you can’t un-annotate it. Strikeout rocks.
I ended up defining a style for strikeouts, with a border and a background color. Although “styles” in general didn’t behave well (as explained above), a stikeout style behaves the way strikeouts behave. So thank everyone, that solved everything I wanted to solve.
