When compiling a document with many footnotes and comments for PDF, in proofing mode (for I want the the footnotes to appear at the bottom of each page), I get some issues which I don’t know how to resolve:
when compiling, I am invariably told that “some fonts may be substituted during conversion”. In proofing mode, this is normal behaviour. My impression, however, is that the problem here is less the font than the font face. The regular face, indeed, works fine, even with fonts which are not commonly used; but the italics do not, even with very common fonts like Times or Times New Roman: the result is always less than mediocre. Is this impression correct? And are there commonly used fonts which, under these circumstances, work fine both in regular mode and in italics?
in footnotes consisting of more than one paragraph, the line spacing of the second (third ecc.) paragraph is different from that of the first. Moreover, while the first paragraph is indented (under “Footnotes and comments”, indeed, “Indent footnotes to match text” is selected), the second (third ecc.) are not. Are both things inevitable?
one of the presets under Format > Formatting is a paragraph mode for citations, with a smaller font size and with larger margins on both sides. After compiling, the font size remains indeed smaller, and the left margin larger, as they should be; but the right margin is not larger, but much smaller than that of the default paragraph. What am I doing wrong here?
after compiling, the headers of the first chapter are in regular face, as expected, but the headers of the other chapters unexpectedly appear in bold. Moreover, all text elements which are in bold (chapter titles, headers) are not sharp: they have a kind of shadow around them. What’s the explanation here?
To provide a little background into the limitations of the proofing engine, this is using the same conversion tool that is used to convert RTF to .doc/x and .odt formats. While Keith was putting that together, he noticed the conversion engine could also do a pretty decent job of RTF->PDF. It wasn’t good enough, however, to be used as the default engine, and so that is how the “Proofing” monicker came to be. We figured it would be nice for those that are just proofing because end-of-page footnotes will surely be more convenient for that process. As a surrogate final-production output though? Yeahhh… not so much. Perhaps in some very narrow circumstances one could save the step of loading an RTF/ODT in LibreOffice and exporting to PDF from there, but for the most part I would suggest not relying upon it, especially once you start spending more time trying to get it to work than it would take to do the word processor cycle. That’s just me though, I don’t know exactly what all you’re going for.
Okay in order:
The fonts thing is a bit odd, it seems to work differently depending on the configuration of the system. I had no trouble with Palatino with italics and bold in a quick test. I suggest experimenting a bit. It seems the types of fonts it has the most trouble with are PostScript type fonts (which can be wrapped in OpenType, you have to check in Font Book to verify a font’s underlying format, you can’t just rely upon the extension). If you are just proofing, it may okay to just select a font that works?
I cannot reproduce this one myself. I have a feeling the condition you are seeing requires a very specific arrangement of features that I’m not using. For my test, I used global override formatting, 1.1 line-height for the main text, with 0.25" first-indent. Subsequent paragraphs in footnotes looked just like the first paragraph, and were indented according to my first-line settings.
That may have been a preset you added. There isn’t a citation format in the application defaults. I have tested right and left indents, with preserve formatting and without (no override in compile) and both worked fine. Perhaps it is an error in ruler calculation? Recall that Scrivener’s ruler in the main editor does not adjust for margin settings. What may look like a 1“ offset on the ruler may disappear once 1” of margin is added to the left.
Does the “shadow” effect persist to printout? How a PDF looks on a computer monitor does not always reflect the quality of the printout, depending upon the fonts being used. I’m well familiar with that problem with LaTeX in years past (fortunately, not a problem these days). Ten years ago if you produced a PDF with LaTeX it looked like garbage on a Mac, completely unreadable, but out of a printer? Gorgeous.
As for the bold headings issue itself, I’d cross-check with Publishing PDF to make sure that isn’t just a bad compile setting.
It may be easiest to provide me with a simple sample project with some junk text that is otherwise formatted the way you want, all set up so that I can load it, use File/Compile…, click the Compile button and see the flaws.
Thanks a lot, Amber, for your quick and detailed answer, interesting to read and to the point as always!
Of course you’re right that the proofing mode as such is just an instrument for reviewing the content of a text, and that there are far better ways to give a text its final form. But I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and versatility of the text rendering even in proofing mode, and I just wanted to understand a bit better how the rendering engine in this case worked, and what could be expected from it, and what not. And this you explained very well!
I shall follow your suggestions and do some more experimentation. But fortunately it’s not a matter of life and death, because I can leave the final layout to my publisher!
Sounds good, that’s what it is there for—but naturally even for personal usage, italics should be an expected behaviour. Hopefully a different font sorts that out.
Perhaps in some very narrow circumstances one could save the step of loading an RTF/ODT in LibreOffice and exporting to PDF from there, but for the most part I would suggest not relying upon it, especially once you start spending more time trying to get it to work than it would take to do the word processor cycle. That’s just me though, I don’t know exactly what all you’re going for.
Hopefully a different font sorts that out.