Should all endnotes change after I edit the endnotes style?

ccamfield · March 9, 2022, 1:55am

Hi all,

I have just created a Libre Office document by exporting from Scrivener. My document has about 300 Endnotes.

When I went to add an additional endnote, it didn’t match the style of the others. (Problem with the generated document??? ugh) So, I went to edit the Endnotes style. However, when I do that, the text of all of my exported endnotes doesn’t change.

When I inspect the exported endnotes, the UI says that they have the Endnotes style, but if I select the whole text and then re-apply the style I can then see a change.

Is there an option I am missing somewhere to automatically apply style changes to all the text of that style? Or are my endnotes just all messed up?

keme1 · March 9, 2022, 7:09am

As far as I gather from the literatureandlatte website, Scrivener will not export to odt format. This makes me suspect that your export workflow “passed through Microsoft context”. Did you export to Word docx and take it into Writer from there?

“Messed up” is a common consequence of mixing Word and Writer contexts. Typically, a Word document will have most formatting applied directly, and content styles are rarely used unless it is required for document structure (outline and other reference). So when you modified the endnote style, the direct formatting on the notes override (thereby hide) the changes you make to the endnote style.

This is mostly guessing. Cause (and viable solution) cannot be determined with any certainty unless you provide a sample. Can you make a dummy document (or an excerpt from your actual work) which displays the issue, and upload that here?

ccamfield · March 9, 2022, 11:49am

I cannot tell you what is going on inside Scrivener when you do it, but it most definitely exports to Libre Office. Well, to odt, anyway.

keme1 · March 9, 2022, 12:20pm

Excellent! That means my guess was wrong.
All the more important to have an actual sample. So I repeat myself:

ccamfield · March 9, 2022, 12:31pm

Sorry, I missed that! Thank you very much for the offer. I will see if I can export just a small section from Scrivener - that shouldn’t be too hard.

ajlittoz · March 9, 2022, 12:35pm

And there are many ways to export to .odt. Since Scrivener exports to many formats, I bet formatting is rendered as direct formatting which is the easiest and most portable between targets. Unfortunately, this results in a most inconvenient exported document when it comes to formatting tuning.
So, once again, follow @keme1 advice and provide a sample file.

ccamfield · March 9, 2022, 12:42pm

Ok, here we go.

Looking at the endnotes in the exported section, I see that some of the text is even (shown as, anyway) being in Footnote format rather than Endnote. smh.
Endnotes copy.odt (7.5 KB)

keme1 · March 9, 2022, 1:10pm

The formatting is a mess.

Endnotes have the Endnote style applied to the first paragraph. After that, font face/size is added as direct formatting.
If there are multiple paragraphs in the note, second paragraph and forth is in the Footnote style as you observed. Again font properties applied to override the style.
Strangely, those additional paragraphs also have direct formatting for double spaced lines.

This does not render sensibly in neither Word nor Writer, and in a large document it will be a nightmare to do any further work on. Is this the exact file exported from Scrivener, or has it had manual editing?

ccamfield · March 9, 2022, 2:06pm

Blech.

That is an exact file exported from Scrivener. It’s named -copy because I made a backup before trying something in Libre Office and then saved. I then realized the file size was different so I attached the backup here as “directly exported with no alterations”.

keme1 · March 9, 2022, 1:46pm

Scrivener gets consistently good reviews as a production tool (word processor, information/idea organizer, document versioning and workflow planner). If those features in conjunction are important to you, I guess it makes sense to stick with Scrivener. This is based on the feedback in reviews ; I have not touched the thing.

If you need compatibility with other platforms, Scrivener may give you trouble.

Consider:

Have you tried to do things by trial and error in Scrivener? With many levels of formatting on top of each other, exported files can become unwieldy monsters.
Can you make do with PDF output for collaboration? If you don’t need adjustments to be made outside of your own realm, this may be a viable path.

If you need a workable output to process with other tools, and you don’t have any clues about manual settings you applied yourself in Scrivener (which you could avoid/undo in the future), I’d say you should abandon Scrivener. If the given sample is from a fairly basic workflow, it is Scrivener which creates a formatting mess.

ccamfield · March 9, 2022, 2:09pm

With the endnotes, I didn’t try to do anything to them. They weren’t in the font I wanted, but I just left them like that until the export.

“Fortunately” the only collaboration from this point is for me to give the manuscript to my (very small) publisher as a Word doc and he will then import it into InDesign. I think at that point the endnotes will basically just be text, and it might make the most sense to fix the font at that stage. I’ll get in touch with him. Thank you for taking a look!