Software for Authors

Posted by Hugh
May 20, 2011 at 09:07 AM

critStock wrote:
> >Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>>Hugh wrote:
>>>I’m sure there’s a simple division
>here between fiction and
>>non-fiction writers.
>>>Fiction writers may be able to
>get away without using MS Word
>>(although
>>>round-tripping documents with an
>editor without “Track Changes” may be
>>difficult).
> >Three words: footnotes,
>footnotes, footnotes.
>Non-fiction writers of the scholarly subspecies cannot get
>by without them.
>I love simplified writing environments, but they never seem to
>implement footnotes. Incidentally, my understanding is that RTF has footnote
>capabilities by design; but none of the RTF editors/writers I have come across (or
>RTF-based simplified writing environments) seems to implement this feature. Can
>anyone more knowledgeable shed any light on RTF and footnotes?

There’s been quite a lot of discussion on the Scrivener forums about RTF and footnotes. My understanding is that RTF isn’t a completely fixed standard; it comes in different flavours, depending on who is writing the code. Even then the functionality is usually limited; I’ve read for example, that creating footnotes to a single page that can then lay themselves out over several pages is particularly complicated. The Scrivener developer Keith Blount has hacked the standard Apple RTF code to enable it to create and export footnotes—but there’s then the question of which word processors can import them. From memory, in that case Apple’s Pages (paradoxically) cannot, whereas MS Word and its clones can.

I expect that the same may apply to some other developers.