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I like the writing tool Scrivener because of the organisation tools like the corkboard and the no-frills full screen mode. I'm starting out my thesis using the Windows trial and intending to buy if I can make this one other thing work for me: I can't work out a sensible approach to working with figures in it. I want to be able to:

  • specify which pictures from my resources go where
  • specify a caption that goes with a picture
  • have the compile process figure out based on a figure's position in text what the numbering should be (simple 1 to n will suffice)

...ideally with the ability to do this all in markup so that I don't have to switch to the mouse while typing. I'm also very much hoping to avoid compiling and then adding figures manually in Word after every time I compile.

I've heard mention of Scrivener supporting Multimarkdown which can then be compiled into Latex and from there into other formats. This seems a bit convoluted, but tolerable. However, I can't see any multimarkdown options in the compile dialog in my Windows version. Is this a feature only supported by the Mac versions?

Apologies if this is standard Scrivener editing functionality that I've missed somehow, but I've read the text surrounding every instance of the words, "figure", "image" and "caption" in the manual, and I see nothing about how to achieve this. I honestly find the Scrivener documentation and L&L website baffling, give me man pages over this stuff any day.

EDIT: The comment from John Smithers unfortunately does not answer my question - I am looking for some more information that would help me understand why compiling my draft does zero with that tag.

OUTCOME: I basically gave up on doing anything except writing in the Windows version. The image / caption markup features I wanted existed in theory, but they were broken under Windows, which L&L freely admitted, and they had no timeline to fix them. I ended up exporting to RTF, using Zotero's RTF scan feature for references, and leaving text (literally "picture #1 goes here") in the position where I wanted pictures, which I manually replaced with images when I finally turned the RTF export into a Word document. So thanks for pretty much nothing Scrivener, I should've used Latex and saved the 40$.

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specify which pictures from my resources go where

You can do this with the placement of the <$IMG> tag (though it may not be available in the Windows version). See this article

Specify a caption that goes with a picture

This is something that scrivener seems a little counter-intuitive on, but here's a post on the Literature and Latte forum that describes how to use figure/image captions.

have the compile process figure out based on a figure's position in text what the numbering should be (simple 1 to n will suffice)

That seems to be covered here. The cross-reference callout functionality seems to allow for automatic numbering based on image position in a manuscript.

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