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kareinaOne of the many things I have loved about writing my thesis in Scrivener is the ability to compile it to epub, and open the current draft as a book on my phone (complete with cover art!). One of the things I have found most frustrating is the fact that the superscript and subscript text, which works perfectly in Scrivener itself, and which complies correctly to a Word Document or a pdf, kept reverting to normal text in the ebooks. There is a huge difference in appearance between Mg₆[Si₈O₂₀](OH)₄ and Mg6[Si8O20)(OH)4 (the chemical formula for talc), and I like the former much, much better, thank you very much!
I have tried many times to solve this issue, and never had any luck finding anything. All of the documentation talked of the importance of using Scrivener's built-in style function to define the super- or subscripted text, which I did, and how that works. Except that it didn't. Today I found something else, which explained that some fonts have built-in unicode subscript and superscript characters, and that one can insert them through Scrivener. Of course the page I found was many years out of date, and their path to find it didn't work, so it took a bit of poking around before I finally determined that if you are in your document, with your cursor where you want to be writing, and you go to Edit > Writing tools > character map you will get a pop-up window. If you then use the drop-down next to the word Font: to select the font you have been using (in my case Times New Roman), you can then use the slider bar at the side to scroll through ALL the characters available in that font to find the ones of interest. For this font the degree sign, and supescript 1 and 2 (°, ¹, ²) are all up near the top, right after some of the most common special characters, and before the list of accented variations of letters used in other languages. Then, way, way down, much lower in the table, below many of the accented letters, all of the other superscripted numerals, and the plus and minus symbols, and the subscripted numerals appear.
That pop up menu isn't the most intuitive to learn to use, but after a couple of errors I figured out the trick. Click on the character you want, then press the "select" button, and the character appears in the "characters to copy" box. Repeat these steps for as many characters as you like, and all of them will appear in that box. Then press "copy", and everything in that box will get copied, and can be pasted into your scrivener document, or into your blog post, or anywhere else you want to paste them.
Because the pop up Character Map window isn't the easiest to find things in, I copied all of the super- and subscript numerals, and the plus and minus symbol, and pasted them into their own scrivener document, which I can keep open in the second window as I go through the thesis, find all of the places I have super or subscripts, and replace them with the unicode versions. Much to my delight, these forms actually look better than the results I had been getting using the "apply subscript" or "apply superscript" buttons, and they compile correctly to epub, and I am much, much happier.
I have tried many times to solve this issue, and never had any luck finding anything. All of the documentation talked of the importance of using Scrivener's built-in style function to define the super- or subscripted text, which I did, and how that works. Except that it didn't. Today I found something else, which explained that some fonts have built-in unicode subscript and superscript characters, and that one can insert them through Scrivener. Of course the page I found was many years out of date, and their path to find it didn't work, so it took a bit of poking around before I finally determined that if you are in your document, with your cursor where you want to be writing, and you go to Edit > Writing tools > character map you will get a pop-up window. If you then use the drop-down next to the word Font: to select the font you have been using (in my case Times New Roman), you can then use the slider bar at the side to scroll through ALL the characters available in that font to find the ones of interest. For this font the degree sign, and supescript 1 and 2 (°, ¹, ²) are all up near the top, right after some of the most common special characters, and before the list of accented variations of letters used in other languages. Then, way, way down, much lower in the table, below many of the accented letters, all of the other superscripted numerals, and the plus and minus symbols, and the subscripted numerals appear.
That pop up menu isn't the most intuitive to learn to use, but after a couple of errors I figured out the trick. Click on the character you want, then press the "select" button, and the character appears in the "characters to copy" box. Repeat these steps for as many characters as you like, and all of them will appear in that box. Then press "copy", and everything in that box will get copied, and can be pasted into your scrivener document, or into your blog post, or anywhere else you want to paste them.
Because the pop up Character Map window isn't the easiest to find things in, I copied all of the super- and subscript numerals, and the plus and minus symbol, and pasted them into their own scrivener document, which I can keep open in the second window as I go through the thesis, find all of the places I have super or subscripts, and replace them with the unicode versions. Much to my delight, these forms actually look better than the results I had been getting using the "apply subscript" or "apply superscript" buttons, and they compile correctly to epub, and I am much, much happier.