I am working hard at completing my first book. I have worked as a proposal writer and editor before and I am familiar with style guides, but for technical documents only. My work is fairly in depth and has several numbered lists, 1-5, 1-10 at the most. It is in the category of creative nonfiction. When I format a list, Scrivener will not allow me to create a full return space between each section without starting the next paragraph as numbered, then going into each newly numbered section and increasing where the number begins. This is workable, but it gets tedious.
The normal workaround is to set the paragraph spacing to either 9, 12, or 16 points after each section so I don’t have to insert a full paragraph return between each numbered section. Because my work is nearing completion, I have to go through the document to ensure that whatever way of numbering I have used, remains consistent throughout the document. I have yet to begin submitting my book for editing and publishing, and the question of how to go about doing that is a whole other challenge. I assume that an editor is going to provide feedback on consistent formatting so I hope I am not getting the cart before the horse, so to speak. Can anyone offer me advice as to what is considered normal in setting up spacing between numbered sections of a list? Thank you.
It’s normal for a list to have whatever the normal paragraph spacing is between items.
If the numbered items are actually sections, then the “Scrivener-like” answer would be to treat them as such: give each section an item in the Binder, and use the Compile command to impose whatever formatting you want.
Thank you but, that doesn’t answer my question. I am asking from those who understand formatting, what is the appropriate line spacing for a numbered list? The rest of the document is in the standard Scrivener formatted style of body text. When I worked on proposals I had specific style guide I had to follow depending on what company was writing out the proposal. This included fonts, TOC, caption formatting, citations, graphics, and line spacing. What I am asking is what is the correct way to layout a numbered list in Scrivener or, can someone please point me to a style guide reference to answer this question for creative non fiction?
The specific formatting requirement is going to depend on the publisher.
As I said, the “standard” approach is what Scrivener implements: each list item is treated as a paragraph, with the same line spacing between items as between normal paragraphs. Typically, manuscript submission formats are double-spaced.