In compiling a manuscript with lots of superscripts and subscripts I find that many come out in random tiny point sizes including 5, 5.5, 7, 8, and probably some others. Source doc is Avenir Book 10, and I changed Normal style in Word to TNR 12. A subscript “i” in 5.5-pt font barely registers as a few pixels, and I’ve probably missed fixing some. I can take the whole doc and set it to 12-point and then fix the things that are supposed to be in other font sizes, but I wonder if there is a way to control this on compile.
Where do these superscripts and subscripts originate from?
You mean footnotes markers? Or inline superscript text that you would have imported from elsewhere?
I ask because superscript or subscript text normally (in scrivener) don’t have a different font size. – They look (and are) indeed smaller in size, but that’s from the attribute. The font size registers as the same.
If you have imported those from elsewhere, I would search them using “similar formatting”, and reset them. (Cut, paste and match style, attribute.)
At least try for one document that otherwise comes out all messed up.
Most all the text was typed into Scrivener and then set as super or sub using a toolbar icon. So they should all be 10-pt. But the document has them in a number of sizes. I cannot explain that. 12-pt superscripts in a footnote came out in some tiny size.
In Scrivener? Or post compile?
And is it just footnote’s text’s super/subscripts?
Or body text’s as well?
Here is a wild diagnostic thought: I wonder if you might sometimes have manually superscripted in Scrivener a footnote number. Since footnote numbers would get superscripted (shrunk and lifted) on compile to, say, docx, these would turn out as superscript of superscript. Hence weirdly small size on the output.
2 Likes
As far as I can tell, the weird ones were just typed into Scrivener and then super- or subscripted, e.g., I type SiO2 and then select the 2 and hit the subscript button that I have in the toolbar. I don’t understand why some are now in different font sizes as my No style format has not changed in a long time. On the other hand, in a footnote, all in Helvetica 12 in Scrivener, the compiled output has superscripts in 5.5-point font, along with the footnote number.
It’s all fixable, just weird and one more thing that has to be attended to.
Have you tried compiling to other compatible formats?
I’ll try rtf with the next chapter. Good idea.
If the discrepancy you are seeing is just only between a) the resulting formatting of manually made superscripts, and b) the resulting formatting of footnote numbers, then maybe now we are getting somewhere. For this is a systematic and thus not an entirely mysterious discrepancy.
A useful thing to note is that docx files produced by Scrivener do not invoke your Normal template in Word. The styling of footnote numbers is thus down to a decision made by Scrivener as to how to represent those numbers. (Way too small, as it happens.) And this may not correspond to how you are accustomed and would prefer to see them.
Another thing to try: copy the entire Word doc text and Paste into a brand new Word doc. This will give you a doc with the right content, but which also invokes the formatting specs of your Word Normal template — which you probably always want. Your footnotes may, unfortunately, still need massaging to look as expected, because (if memory serves) Scrivener uses character and paragraph style names that do not match Word’s char and para styles for footnote elements. (At least they don’t match with the style names of such elements in my aging copy of Word. Your mileage may vary.)