Chapter 14 · The Editor
Footnotes, Images, and Tables
A novel in Skarvia is a real word processor document, so it can hold a footnote, a photograph, and a table of dates. Each of those three survives a different set of exports, and the differences matter more than the buttons do. This chapter covers both.
Where the Insert tab lives
Open a novel and the ribbon carries a tab called Insert, between Home and Review. It holds three groups:
- Image, Table, and Edit Table ▾.
- Page Break, Scene Break, and Footnote.
- Symbol ▾, a short menu of characters that are awkward to type: an em dash, an ellipsis, ©, §, and °.
The Insert tab appears on novels only. A screenplay has a Script tab in that position, a stage play and an audio drama have Elements, and a video script has Timing. Footnotes, images and tables are not hidden in those formats; they do not exist there. A page of industry screenplay format has no room for any of them, and adding them would break the page count that makes the format worth having.
Footnotes
Put the cursor where the marker should sit and click Footnote. A dialog headed Footnote opens with one text box. Type the note and press Save. Saving an empty box inserts nothing, so a footnote you change your mind about mid-dialog costs you a Cancel and no more.
The marker lands in your sentence as a small superscript number in blue. Numbers are counted down the document rather than stored, so inserting a note halfway through a chapter renumbers everything after it on the spot. Hovering a marker shows the note as a tooltip.
To edit a note, double-click its marker. The same dialog reopens with the existing text in it, and Save replaces it.
Emptying a note does not remove its marker. Clear the text and save, and the marker stays in the sentence, still numbered, still taking up a counter position, while printing nothing at either end. To delete a footnote properly, put the cursor immediately after the marker and press Backspace. The marker is a single object rather than a run of characters, so one press takes the whole thing.
There is no keyboard shortcut for a footnote. The full shortcut list is in Chapter 10, and it is authoritative: if a key is not listed there, it is not bound.
Images
Click Image and your browser's file picker opens. Skarvia accepts PNG, JPG, GIF, and WebP, up to 5 MB per file. Three refusals are possible, and each says which one it is:
| Message | What happened |
|---|---|
| PNG, JPG, GIF, or WebP only | The file extension is not one of the four. A
.heic straight off an iPhone is the usual culprit; convert it first. |
| Image too large (5 MB max) | Exactly what it says. The upload is refused as soon as it crosses the line rather than after the whole file has travelled. |
| File doesn't look like an image | The name says PNG and the contents do not. Skarvia checks the first bytes of every upload, not the extension. |
A picture arrives as a block of its own, centred, scaled to the width of the column. Click it to select it, which draws a blue outline, then press Backspace to remove it. You can drag a selected image to move it somewhere else in the chapter.
Alt text comes from the file name, with the extension stripped, and there is no
field anywhere to change it afterwards. This sounds like a detail and is not: alt text is the only
part of a picture that reaches plain text and EPUB. Rename the file to something a reader would
understand before you upload it, and DSC_04417.jpg stops being the caption of your
frontispiece.
Your pictures do not go into your Dropbox, Drive or local folder. Everything
else about a document does, as Chapter 3 describes, but
an uploaded image is held privately by Skarvia and served through a route that checks who you are,
so its address is useless to anyone without access to the document. Your synced
.txt carries the line [Image: alt text] where the picture sits.
To get the picture out as a file, export to Word, which embeds it. Deleting the document deletes
its uploaded images with it.
One benefit of that arrangement: the document stores a link rather than the picture, so a chapter full of photographs does not push you toward the size ceiling on a stored document.
Tables
Table inserts a 3 by 3 table with empty cells. There is no size chooser, and there is no header row: the first row is an ordinary row that you can type headings into.
Tab moves to the next cell and ⇧Tab back to the previous one. In the last cell, Tab does nothing at all; it will not grow the table for you. Add rows and columns from Edit Table ▾:
| Menu item | What it does |
|---|---|
| Row below / Row above | Inserts a row either side of the cell you are in. |
| Column right / Column left | The same, for columns. |
| Delete row / Delete column | Removes the one containing the cursor. |
| Delete table | Removes the whole table. |
Every one of those acts on the cell the cursor is in. With the cursor outside a table they do nothing and say nothing, which is why a click on Row below can appear to be ignored: click into a cell first.
Columns share the width of the page evenly and cannot be dragged wider, so lay out a table as columns of roughly equal weight: that is what the page will give you.
What the counters and the staff see
Words inside table cells are counted like any other words. Footnote text is not counted, and neither is an image's alt text, so a heavily annotated chapter reads shorter in the status bar than it does on the page. Chapter 13 covers what each number in that bar means.
The same boundary applies to your staff. A fact-check, a continuity pass and the Researcher all read the manuscript as it will be read, which includes your table cells and excludes your footnotes. If a claim needs checking, it belongs in the text.
Working in suggestion mode, a footnote inside a struck-through passage is treated as cut. It does not appear in the notes at the end of a printed copy, and it does not reach the Word file.
What each export does with them
This is the part worth knowing before you build a chapter around a table. Every row below was checked against the exporters themselves.
| Export | Footnote | Image | Table |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word (.docx) | A superscript * at the marker, and every note
numbered in a Notes section on a new page at the end | The picture itself, 5.5 inches wide | A real Word table with visible gridlines |
| Print / PDF (browser) | The numbered markers you see on screen, and a Notes list at the foot | The picture as shown | The table as shown |
| Typeset PDF (.pdf) | Not carried | Not carried | One line per row,
cells separated by | |
| Ebook (.epub) | Not carried | Alt text, in italics | Cell text, run together in one paragraph |
| Rich text (.rtf), OpenDocument (.odt), Web page (.html) | Not carried | Not carried | Cell text, run together in one paragraph |
| Plain text (.txt) | Not carried | [Image: alt] |
One line per row, cells joined by | |
Read down the Word column and you have the short version: Word is the export that
carries all three. If your novel depends on footnotes, pictures, or a table that has to
look like a table, hand somebody the .docx. The typeset PDF is built for a manuscript
of prose and is honest about it rather than approximating a picture with a grey box.
One caveat on the Word table: its first row is not marked as a heading, so a table long enough to break across pages will not repeat its headings on the second page. Set that in Word if it matters.
Getting a finished document out, in every format and to every recipient, is Part VIII of this manual. This chapter tells you what to build; that one tells you where it can go.
Updated 2026-08-21 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?