Scrivener 3 is on the way…

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2017 at 01:51 PM

bobmclain wrote:
>This is very strange, and makes me wonder what version of Word you’re
>using and on what computer. I’m not familiar with the EndNote add-on -
>but many of the books I publish don’t require footnotes or endnotes, and
>those that do rarely exceed a couple hundred of them (which Word
>accommodates quite nicely, with no crashes or slow loading/saving). The
>placement of files from Word to Adobe InDesign is pretty flawless, with
>notes appearing as they should, Word styles translated to InDesign
>styles, etc.

It could be down to the specific use case (PhD dissertations) rather than the version of Word and EndNote, as these sorts of problems are confirmed by my PhD students who all end up complaining about the formatting of PhD dissertations in Word (and they use newer versions from mine - I’m still on Office 2010).

We are talking about 300+ page documents, with 50+ images, dozens of tables, hundreds of EndNote references, which could refer to 1000+ citations within the text itself, a dozen headings and sub-headings in each chapter (10+ chapters), with lots of page breaks and section breaks with landscape and portrait orientations, up to 100MB file sizes, depending on the image sizes within.

The key issues are that once the Word document grows to that size and complexity, operations slow down considerably, the application often hangs, and most annoyingly, previous formatting changes get overruled by Word, or the document reflows the text unexpectedly, needing to keep revising the page breaks, heading formatting etc. It just gets very touchy. Every formatting change seems to have a knock-on effect. While EndNote could take some of the blame, it’s probably not the only culprit.

It seems to me that part of the problem is that in a heavily formatted document conflicts develop within Word’s own style markups, which are invisible to the user, but in the background they start conflicting and overriding each other.

My solution to this is to leave the formatting in Word to the very end, and do all outlining, writing etc. in other software (which I prefer anyway).

Another solution could be to learn LaTeX and use Lynx or something like that. But it didn’t seem worthwhile to do for me, as I’m not planning to write another PhD thesis or a book anytime soon (7-10k word journal articles are the standard in my field).