I love working with Scrivener 2.0. The new “inspector” footnotes and comments are a big plus for me, I really appreciate the work put in this feature.
After working on a project with some footnotes for a few days there are a few aspects of working with them that, IMHO, can improve, in order of priority:
1- I would be better to anchor inspector footnotes (IF) to something different than regular text. In the current implementation IFs are anchored to a selection in the text, a sort of link. For instance, if I create an IF at the end of a sentence I get: “This sentence has a [footnote.]”, where the squared bracket indicates the link to the IF. This makes it difficult to move footnotes around. In my opinion a simple icon (like a gear, or a superscript *, something like that) would be a better way to refer to the footnote. Users can then cut and paste, or drag the icon around as they edit the text.
2- When navigating the IF of a text in Full Screen mode, the black background of the current selected footnote does not allow users to easily distinguish the footnote they are on. I wasn’t able to find a way to change the color in Preferences.
3- I think it’d work better to simplify all issues pertaining to annotations (insert a new footnote or comment, switch between inline to inspector) in an Annotations submenu under the Format menu.
4- More controversial, but in my opinion a user may opt to use footnotes & comments either as inline or as inspector elements, but I can’t see much use for keeping coexisting inline and inspector streams. It would be simpler, imho, to have a Project preference to set the annotations as inline or inspector elements, with a simple keystroke combination to move from one scheme to the other. This would make the Format menu more compact and would allow to use the more intuitive command-shift-A/F combination in all contexts.
Thanks!
). You can change the background colour for the full screen comments view using the Appearance pane of the Preferences.