The fact that I’m encountering this problem may be a sign I should switch to a special marker for linked footnotes. But I’ve got very accustomed to the extra prominence given to footnotes by Scrivener’s default use of whole words as footnote anchors. It sometimes happens that in subsequent editing, I want to change the anchor word or some portion of it, and when I do, the footnote stays in place but the outlined anchor shrinks to include just the period or other punctuation at the end of the edited word. I can live with this – I do live with it – but it would be nice if the anchor would re-expand to take in the entire changed word.
Here’s an example of what I mean; after I wrote a footnote anchored in the “all” of “after all,” I changed “after all” to “in the first place”. The bubble around “all” shrank to become a bubble around just the comma:
Because of the way formatting attributes work, this is a little difficult to fix properly. This is because, at the point where formatting change notifications are observed, there is no way for Scrivener to know whether have placed the cursor at the end of a footnote and want to start typing after it, or are editing the footnote itself (each keystroke essentially being independent).
I have made the following improvement for 3.0, though: if you select the text of a footnote and type over it (whether the whole footnote range or part of it), the footnote will now be preserved. So you could select the text you want to change and then type over it to preserve the footnote (backspacing an typing over it will still lose it because of the limitations, though).
