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.