Text Tidying > Replace Multiple Spaces with Single Spaces is a very handy tool. I’m wondering if it’s possible to use the command on a selection of more than one footnote? Currently, if I’m in a Scrivenings session and select all footnotes (as one might do if converting all to default formatting), the option is not available. This leads me to believe that it’s not possible, but thought I’d check.
As a related question, does this command work on a document level, or on whatever is currently in the editor? Using the above example, if I have a large selection of documents in the editor in a Scrivenings session and invoke the command, does it affect all documents? My tests indicate that it does, but again would like to confirm expected behaviour.
To answer your second question first, since it leads directly to a solution: yes. This command is one of those that does not require an explicit selection, and when lacking one, it will impact all visible text in the editor—which in the case of Scrivenings, can mean cleaning up hundreds of texts at once.
So long as you aren’t picky about the footnote highlight itself, with that behaviour in mind, you just need to get footnotes into the editor. The Edit ▸ Transformations ▸ submenu contains two commands, paired for converting footnotes between inline and linked formatting. Thus you can dump all of their content into the main editor, where they can be cleaned up with this command, and then if you wish, you can convert them all back to linked, where they become discrete little bubbles of text again and resistant to batch editing commands.
This is all a useful trick to keep in mind for any sort of task where editing footnote content in the editor will be simpler.
(And yes, these conversion commands are also global to the currently visible text.)
I’d recommend making a quick backup via File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To… first. In theory this kind of round-trip conversion is safe, particularly when Scrivener is the thing placing the inline footnotes (it gets more tricky when guessing at what a user meant if they ambiguously place inline footnotes, say at the very beginning of a paragraph), but it never hurts to have a backup before running any large-scale batch operation.
I will definitely experiment with this approach, thanks for the tip. My current WIP is an academic book, with c.75,000 words in body text, with c.800 footnotes containing another 15,000+ words. That’s a lot of footnotes to be checking through to make sure nothing got moved or slightly messed up, but worth the experimentation to see if Scriv can handle it.