I noticed that when a title contains the degree symbol, Scrivener will refuse to compile the text file. I click on the compile button, and the application just stands still, with no progress whatsoever. The only way out is to interrupt the compilation.
That’s odd, I can add a º to titles in one of my own documents and there’s no problem, but when I try to test your sample document, then as you say, it won’t compile.
Unfortunately I can’t see what’s causing the problem – there’s nothing no obvious difference between my settings and yours, but something’s clearly not working. Console is showing the following error:
27/12/2014 11:55:09.524 Scrivener[8403]: *** -[__NSCFString dataUsingEncoding:allowLossyConversion:]: didn't convert all characters
which seems to indicate that there is a bug somewhere but I’m neither a developer, nor connected with Scrivener, so unfortunately I can’t help you any further.
I think your best bet is probably to report this formally to Scrivener by email and include both your test file and the console log.
This one tripped me up as well. It is worth noting that although Opt-0 (zero) works, it works by using a character that isn’t a degree symbol, but instead is the masculine ordinal indicator (which you’ll probably be most familiar with from the Numero Sign: №). So although it may look right in some fonts, it may not always look right (some will render it with an underscore beneath the ‘o’), and if you need it to be accurate at the Unicode level, you should use Shift-Opt-8 (which will crash the compiler at the moment, but it will be fixed. It’s a silly bug that is many years old, with one of the text engine’s routines that is meant to reduce a string of text to basic ASCII characters—we need that for RTF’s internal bookmarking, which is how table of contents and cross-references function.)
So all around the best solution at the moment is to use another character so that you can compile, but remember to swap it back after you compile, using search and replace.
Okay. As an aside, I wish Apple would standardise Alt/Opt on their keyboards in English-speaking countries. Choose one or the other and then use it universally.
I’ve never understood what their intention was with that, either. They only started putting Alt on the key (in minor print, confusingly almost like a Fn label) to make it easier to figure out which key you should press when using UNIX and MS software on a Mac, but then more recently they mysteriously banished the term “Option” in some regions, entirely. Oh well, I still think it should be an Key, not a ⌘ key. :mrgreen: