Importing and Exporting with Footnotes

I cover importing and exporting (compiling) in Chapters 2 and 12, respectively, but here are several things to keep in mind when working with footnotes:

To import a file that has footnotes into Scrivener, convert it to RTF format first. You can usually save a file in RTF format through a Save As command in your word processor.

When compiling your manuscript for use in a word processor, the RTF format is the best at handling footnotes. Thus, you should compile to RTF format, even if you plan to open the manuscript in Word. After you open the file in Word, you can save it as a DOC file.

If you don’t want to use RTF, most formats retain the footnotes but convert them to endnotes.

If you use a footnote marker for part of the manuscript, but then turn the marker setting off, the markers show up in the exported draft, alongside each footnote number.

To avoid this problem, you can move the link from the marker to a word in the text by using one of the following methods:

• Select the text in the Editor that you want to use as the new link, and then right-click the footnote in the Comments & Footnotes pane and choose Move to Selection from the pop-up menu that appears.

• Drag and drop the footnote from the Comments & Footnotes pane to the spot within the text where you want the footnote to appear. Regular linked footnotes link to the nearest word, and footnote markers are placed exactly where you drop them.

If you’re switching from footnote markers to text links, be sure to delete the markers manually; otherwise, they appear in the compiled manuscript.

You can use any combination of the different types of footnotes together in one manuscript. Scrivener numbers them all sequentially without regard to footnote style. When compiling to RTF, you can even choose to have Scrivener export one type of footnote as end-of-page footnotes, and another footnote type as endnotes. You can also export comments (covered in Chapter 10) as footnotes or endnotes.

If you have footnote markers turned on but want to create a standard linked note, highlight the text to link before choosing Format⇒Footnote. Instead of adding a gray bubble with the marker inside it, Scrivener turns the selected text into a link and opens the Comments & Footnotes pane with a footnote text box ready for you to type in. Footnote markers aren’t turned off by this action, only circumvented.