I haven’t found a good explanation of how this is supposed to work, so I can’t tell if it’s a bug or me not compiling properly.
Inside Scrivener I can assign styles, for example to scene text and chapter titles, in the compiler settings.
When I compile to docx and open in Word, I find the style names listed, but they have not been assigned to anything in the compiled text. All formatting looks correct in Word, but unfortunately, it’s all done via character (local) formatting.
If this is working as intended, I fail to see what use styles are when compiling to docx.
I guess that a number of you do what I do and write your manuscript in Scrivener, then export to docx to send off to an editor for editing and revisions. Without properly assigned and implemented styles, working in Word can become nightmarish.
Export of styles to .docx and .odt file formats (to mention those I have tried only) has been working fine for rather long time since implementing. I have just checked it: all the styles I have in my Scrivener project are assigned to respective portions of text in the exported Word document.
There is still quite annoying problem with footnotes export as Normal style, but it seems the theme for some after the release discussions and future updates.
just in case—please, check whether the option „Include style information in exported file“ is checked on in your Compile settings—it should be. (See image attached).
Yes, I made sure it’s checked.
If it’s working for you guys, the problem is probably at my end.
Do you have a link to something that explains how to set it up styles export properly?
I am afraid I am not sure there can be some special instruction for exporting styles so far as preserving styles just seems mandatory for export to a .docx or .odt format.
In the meantime, may I ask about how you made sure your styles were not exported? Maybe, it should be checked twice. While in Word, do you put cursor in a paragraph marked as, say, ‘my very special style’ in Scrivener project and see its style as Normal?
I need to backtrack a bit.
I can now get most of the styles I expect exported to the Word document, and also have them applied to the expected paragraphs.
E.g. in my test the chapter headings are assigned the style “MyHeading” while the scene paragraphs are assigned the style “MyBody” when I examine them in Word. All formatting appears to be as defined by what’s set up in Scrivener’s Compile-> Section Layouts.
So far, so good.
Then it gets a bit weird.
Although the first (no first line indent) and second (first line indented) paragraph both show up as MyBody, if you select them and press -SPACE to clear character formatting, the font family and size change to Word’s default Calibri 10pt, but the paragraph layouts now seem to be controlled by what’s defined in Scrivener’s Compile->Styles.
In any case, I have not used Calibri in the Scrivener setup and I’d expect the style to retain New Times Roman, or whatever I’ve set compile to use.
Depending on how I set up Scrivener’s styles, I sometimes get different results inside Word between using -SPACE on a paragraph and re-applying the MyBody style.
In some cases I get exactly the same results for these two actions, in others the results are different, e.g. the justification differs.
There are inconsistencies I just don’t understand here.
I realize this sounds muddled, but it’s as close to what I’m experiencing as I can get.
I suspect this matter is all about ‘Formatting’ parameter in Scrivener’s styles. Did you set ‘Save all formatting’ for a paragraph style, including font ant size? If not, you have got in Word exactly what you are expected to. )
The styles I used “MyBody” and “MyHeading” are defined within the compile format I used to ‘export’ to docx.
As such, they don’t show up in the Scrivener editor list of available styles.
My idea was that I could use the editor without applying styles, i.e. let scene text stay as “No Style” and let the compiler do its magic and apply styles for use in the exported format.
Did I misunderstand you, or do I need to apply styles everywhere in the Scrivener editor to make this work?
If so, doesn’t it clash with what seems to the Scrivener approach to style use?
It’s a good question, but I am hardly a good adviser here—I’ve never used (and not going to use) Compiler to apply styles. In any case—any style is a set of formatting parameters applied to a certain portion of text. I can only suppose that regardless of how you apply your own style, you are to define it somewhere before you can apply it. So what about creating some testing paragraph style through respective menu in Editor (make sure the font and size are included), and then applying it through Compile menu, so far as you prefer that way? I am sure there is detail instruction on the matter in the User’s Guide.
P.S. And, answering to your question, I do not find Scrivener approach to styles perfect, at least. In any case, ‘No Style’ itself cannot be anything other than a special style. Some options connected with it can work perfectly for some customers, maybe a good deal of them, but conceptually it is counterintuitive and, in my view, led developers to some conceptual flaws like lack of (necessary) option to set special style for footnotes/endnotes (now they are exported as Normal style), lack of (important) option to convert ‘italics’ to ‘Emphasized’ font style, etc.
I’ll do some further testing, as this is important to my workflow.
I’ve tried looking for answers in the manual. Now, it’s likely I’ve gotten dumber in my advancing years, but I haven’t found a clear answer on how to do this yet.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply, though.
Now I tried applying an editor style to my scene text.
The end result was pretty much the same as what I described before, except now the exported style had been set as font family “Courier New”.
I never use Courier and I have no idea why the Scrivener compiler decided to use this font family, this time around.
There are a number of checkboxes whose effect on the final export I don’t know, including
Override text and notes formatting
Include font family / Include font size
When Scrivener 3 for Windows is finally released, I’ll post a summary of how I wished this worked, but in the meantime, I’m struggling to understand the developer’s vision or implementation of said vision.
Having a smooth export of styles to docx at compile time would save me, and probably many others, a great number of hours of extra work.
For a user used to Word, or Writer, or InDesign, the most confusing thing about creating a style in Scrivener is that you are not supposed to start from some special menu. You are to fully format some paragraph, and then create new style based on this paragraph’s formatting through menu: ‘Format > Style > New Style from Selection…’. It is there where you get the options concerning font and size I mentioned earlier.
