{"id":14909,"date":"2019-11-06T13:15:12","date_gmt":"2019-11-06T13:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=14909"},"modified":"2020-05-28T17:25:09","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T17:25:09","slug":"of-course-im-spending-hours-fiddling-with-writing-tools-instead-of-writing-what-else-would-i-be-doing-i-fail-to-get-along-with-scrivener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2019\/11\/06\/of-course-im-spending-hours-fiddling-with-writing-tools-instead-of-writing-what-else-would-i-be-doing-i-fail-to-get-along-with-scrivener\/","title":{"rendered":"Of course I’m spending hours fiddling with writing tools instead of writing, what else would I be doing. I fail to get along with Scrivener"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a folder full of LibreOffice documents, and it’s getting unwieldy. I could really do with something more like an IDE<\/a> for writing \u2014 which is precisely what Scrivener<\/a> promises.<\/p>\n

A lot of people I know love<\/i> Scrivener and wouldn’t do without it. So I’d say you should definitely<\/i> try it \u2014 but I’m not a fan.<\/p>\n

Check this out:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nScrivener can’t do multiple anchors to a footnote, Wine<\/a>‘s font rendering is awful, Scrivener doesn’t do font fallback for missing Unicode characters \u2014 and its inline footnote display is eye-bleeding.<\/p>\n

(LibreOffice renders fonts with HarfBuzz<\/a> \u2014 like anything sensible<\/i><\/a> does \u2014 and does fallback with fontconfig<\/a> or its built-in font list.<\/a> The font above is Microsoft’s 1990s take<\/a> on Monotype Garamond,<\/a> which used to come with Microsoft Office \u2014 though Microsoft forgot to include the bold italic. LibreOffice’s fallback font for Chinese characters is Noto Sans CJK SC Regular.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The real dealbreaker is that Scrivener cannot<\/i> do footnotes with multiple anchors \u2014 where one footnote (or endnote) is referred to several times, with the same number anchoring it in the text.<\/p>\n

LibreOffice does multiply-anchored footnotes using a kludgy cross-reference mechanism<\/a> \u2014 same as Microsoft Word.<\/a> This is disconcertingly terrible when I’m used to the Wikipedia visual editor \u2014 if you cut’n’paste a reference anchor on Wikipedia, it creates a second anchor to the same reference,<\/a> which is pretty much always what you want. If you do this in LibreOffice or Word, it creates a duplicate footnote<\/i> \u2014 I’m at a loss as to when this would ever be the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

Macintosh Scrivener can apparently do<\/a> multiply-anchored footnotes \u2014 but the Windows version is a legacy leftover that gets occasional patches.<\/p>\n

I first went “ick” at Scrivener ‘cos the actual word processor is not great \u2014 I’ve been spoilt by LibreOffice Writer, which is awesome \u2014 but not being able to do multiply-anchored footnotes without ridiculous workarounds<\/a> is a hard fail.<\/p>\n

Next \u2014 see if Zotero<\/a> in LibreOffice is less painful, at least for doing multiply-anchored footnotes.<\/p>\n

(No, I’m not interested in trying LA<\/sup>TE<\/sub>X.)<\/p>\n

\"Become<\/a>

Your subscriptions keep this site going. Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With bonus taster from forthcoming Libra thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[322,1528],"class_list":["post-14909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-libreoffice","tag-scrivener"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14909"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16412,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14909\/revisions\/16412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}