I have a short story collection and was wondering about the best/easiest way to indicate the end of each story. At the moment, each short story is a folder that contains a document for the story itself and a second document in the folder that contains nothing but a centered <<<<>>>> and is to be compiled as-is.
Are there better ways to accomplish this?
Thanks!
What you are looking for is in the “Separators” section of the Compile dialogue. You’ll have to expand that window to see the various options. I think you’ll want to put your <<<< >>>> characters in the “Text and Folder Separator” section (the last one).
Then you can delete the documents that just contain the chevrons.
THANKS! Tried the section you suggested using the “Custom” choice and <<<<>>>> for text but no success. Will try different variations. I’ll even copy/paste my text into a new short story template just to be sure and start fresh.
I’ll get the hang of this sooner or later! 
Reviewed the manual, section 19.5 Separators and, after experimenting several times, I am finding that neither “Folder Separator” (custom) nor “Text and Folder Separator” (custom) will display the end-of-story characters I would like to see. 
Because this is a collection, it seemed logical to take the novel template and make each short story a chapter. Is that a mistake?
Thanks for any advice!
That’s the way I would do it. You could start with a blank template and set it up just the way you want, but as most of the work has been done with the novel template it seems a good choice.
As to having trouble with compile: I have trouble, too. However, with a bit of faffing around I generally get it to work. The compile settings page seems, to me, to be illogical. But it’s more my problem than a fault with Scrivener.
I agree, Camy. It takes some time to get used to the “philosophy” but, so far, I am very pleased I went ahead and bought it.
Very odd. Can you provide a screen shot of (a sample of) your binder structure and another of your Separators compile settings? (Bonus points if you can fit them both in one shot 
)
I was thinking, if your collection is fairly simple, structurally speaking (one document per short story), you could just have the binder contain a series of documents without any containing folders. It might take some fiddling to get your title page and other front matter all squared away, but then you’d be using the Text Separator setting instead of the Text and Folder separator, and the titles of each piece could be pulled from the name of each short story document. Using the document names for titles means that you can separately control the font settings for titles and text.
If you’ve already gone to a lot of trouble setting things up as-is, then I wouldn’t bother with my reorganization suggestion. Scrivener is flexible enough that you can do things your way (for the most part) instead of bending to it’s requirements.
For this collection, I might take your suggestion and stick with what appears to be working (I have a “dummy” document following each short story document that has my <<<>>> separator in it).
Here is an upload jpg of my compile settings. I did it as an attachment in hopes that it won’t stretch things out too much. I have tried all four options, just to experiment. THANKS!
I’m flummoxed. If you turned on the custom option for the “Text and Folder Separator”, and that didn’t give you an extra <<<<< >>>>> (in addition to the one in the “end” documents", then I’ve reached the end of my understanding of what’s going on. It might be a bug.
FYI, as you probably guessed, the icons next to the drop-down menu for “Empty Line”, “Custom”, etc… show you where the separator will appear. At the top, it’s between every adjacent text document, the second one is between every adjacent folder (two empty folders, that is), the third would put the separator between each folder and the first document it contains (such as between “Max and the Cook” and the following “Scene” document. The last option, if you choose Custom, should put the <<<< >>>> after the “end” documents in your current configuration if those documents are immediately followed by another short-story folder. One would also appear after the document “J W Nelson grew…” because there’s a folder following that document.
Maybe someone at the support email would be willing to take a look at your project… You might give that a try just to figure out why this isn’t working.
MANY thanks for taking the time to puzzle this out with me. It could be a bug, since it does not appear to do what I ask it to do. (I had fun doing several tests with several different settings to see if there was a combination needed to do want I want.)
I started this with the Novel template and also copied over three of the stories to another project using the Short Story template. There I generated some even more “interesting” compile results.
Still, the Novel template is more appropriate for a short story collection (and Scrivener’s flexibility means I can output standalone stories as well as collections, and always be able to see all the stories at a glance if I wish). 
This is working properly for me, so I don’t think it’s a bug, but we may just need to tweak some compile settings. My first thought is that you may have the folders not included in compile, which would affect the separators. Check in the Contents pane of the Compile window there to make sure the folders are all checked for inclusion. Also make sure that you don’t have “Page Break Before” checked for the folders–that will supersede the separator setting.
Next, in the Formatting pane, make sure that you’ve checked the “Title” column box in the Folder row at the top or else that you’ve assigned a title prefix or suffix for that row (the Novel template would have something like “CHAPTER ONE” by default, but you’d presumably want to change that for your story collection)–the text should appear in the sample area below. If that text area is blank, it means that nothing from the folders is being compiled, so again this will affect your separators and it’s like you’re just compiling a series of single text documents with no folders at all.
If that’s all set, then you should be able to use the custom separator of <<<>>> or what have you as the Text and Folder Separator (the one at the bottom of the Separators pane) to insert the custom marker between the final document scene of each story and the following folder’s title.
This is great! Many thanks for these very helpful comments.
John