Book with LOTS of pictures

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

One of my alleged books will have a picture on the left page of every open pair, and text on the right. Not much text.

I’d appreciate a link or other pointer to ideas on how best to work thru this book in Scrivener.

Thanks!

2

I would put all of the pictures into the binder somewhere, so you can open each respective picture in a split on the left side and write the content on the right split. Or you could go ahead and put the pictures into text files in the draft so that they compile out together. It really depends on what layout tool you are going to be working with to put the actual page designs together. InDesign doesn’t work so well with embedded images, so a folder of graphics that you exported from Scrivener would work best there. With a program like Word that is a publishing/writing hybrid, inline would make your life easier.

As for getting the words down right, using Page View will help you out. Bear in mind this is not a layout tool, so don’t expect it to be 100% accurate. You might end up with a few sections that run over onto the next page by a word or two; if you’re worried about that you could shrink the virtual page size by a couple of lines, a bit like setting the clock ahead :slight_smile:. But you can improve the accuracy of Page View. See §16.2 (pg. 225) in the user manual.

3

Thanks, Amber. I’ll try those options and see what I like. Also need to figure out how I’ll get it to paper, if in fact paper is where I decide to put it. InDesign makes me want to poke my eyes out, but Word is pretty weak. Maybe if all the organization is done first …

Thanks!

4

If you wanted to try and avoid using a layout program, you could maybe get away with putting page breaks in between text items. So basically you’d have a folder for each layout:

Draft/
	Prologue
	Layout One/
		Picture page
		Poetry page
	Layout Two/
		...

Then in the Separators compile option pane you would set adjoined text documents (“Picture Page” and “Poetry page” to have a page break between them, as well as the standard folder-following-text seam where “Poetry page” leads in to “Layout two”—another page break there.

So long as all of the photos are perfectly sized, and you’re careful with the Page View mode, that should work for basic layout straight to PDF. I don’t know though, the quality of the typesetting is going to be better in InDesign.

5

thanks, that should at least work for draft prints. i’ll give it a go!