Bullet With Butterfly Wings – Nearly there (and a rant about footnotes)

Finally – after two hours of dicking around (technically speaking) I have completed the first draft revision on Bullet With Butterfly Wings. The story runs in at just over 20,000 words. I need to have another pass on a printed version (no printer at home) before unleashing its sheer awesomeness(1).

The document was initially written up in Appleworks 13 years ago. In the time in between it has gone from Word to Apple Pages and eventually into my writing app of choice Scrivener (an excellent literary-writing app for the Mac) and along the way I have constantly struggled with what was back then a writing pleasure of mine; footnotes.

Over the years different applications have treated footnotes different, with their own particular quirks and oddities. This was resolved with Scrivener, which has great support for footnotes until you get the bloody document into a final output format. As Scrivener is not a word processor per se you have to export the text into word or Apple pages to do your final production prior to printing/pdf etc.

So what happens? Footnotes aren’t being exported. Or rather, they are being exported but only to word. Which I don’t use. Hate, in fact. It’s slowly, damn ugly and its styles and formatting bordering on retardation. Apple Pages simply ignores the footnotes (along with headings and page breaks, which is equally retarded). It still isn’t perfect – alignment is ignored for example, which is pretty fucking worrying come to think about it.

Now according to Scrivener’s documentation the RTF export does support footnotes, so I still have a harbouring feeling that the problem starts there. I might fire an email off to the makers to make sure.

(1) awesomeness not guaranteed