Centering Issue When Compiling...

[Mr_Monsieur]

Hey Folks!

I’ve checked earlier posts here on this issue, and went into Compile>Formatting>Options>Preserve Alignment>Centered text only, so as to preserve the centering in the document I’m working on.

This did not solve my problem, however: when I compile the document to .mobi, the entire document is left-aligned (even though in Scrivener nearly everything is/appears center-aligned.

What’s particularly odd is that I built this document based on an earlier document, which compiles just fine (it preserves centering).

Any suggestions as to what might be happening/how I might fix this?

Thanks in advance…and I wish everyone reading this a great Thanksgiving!

[Briar_Kit]

Have you tried Format > Formatting > Preserve Formatting?

Happy Thanksgiving. Good luck!

15.4.6 Preserve Formatting
If you are planning on letting Scrivener’s compiler do all or most of the final formatting for you, it can often be useful to preserve ranges of text from the formatting engine. A common example of this would be the use of block-quoting as a left indent. Technical writers might find it useful to set apart blocks of text as “code”, using a special font and layout. In the past, you had to break out these special sections into their own documents and preserve the formatting of the entire document. Now you can define these ranges right in their original context.

To specify a range of text for preservation, select the text in the editor, and then invoke the Format > Formatting > Preserve Formatting menu command. This will draw a blue dashed box around the text, which can be worked around and within like any other type of formatting range, such as italics. Also like other formatting tools, to toggle a preserved range off, simply select the entire range and use this same menu command.

Preserved formatting will also protect your text when using the Documents > Convert > Formatting to Default Text Style tool, which is useful for homogenising the look of your document according to your preferences. Any text contained within these blocks will retain their original formatting and not be touched by this tool.

MultiMarkdown users can use preserved formatting ranges to define code blocks. Any paragraphs located within a Preserve Formatting range will have a tab character added to the front of each line within it, informing the MMD engine to treat the text like a code block.

Authors working with HTML may use Preserve Formatting to preserve ranges of raw HTML code. If you wish to type in some HTML code by hand and have it passed straight through to the final result, you can use this tool in conjunction with the HTML Settings compile pane (section 24.16) setting, “Treat ‘Preserve Formatting’ blocks as raw HTML”, enabled.

[Mr_Monsieur]

Hi Briar!

Thanks for your response and suggestion…I went ahead and tried that on one page of the document - still no luck! It keeps on left-aligning the text(!)

[Briar_Kit]

Mmmm.

You have tried:
Compile>Formatting>Options>Preserve Alignment>Centered text only

Does…
Compile>Formatting>Options>Preserve Formatting only preserves: >Alignment
… make a difference?

Preserve Formatting only preserves
Adjusts how the Format > Formatting > Preserve Formatting feature works (subsection 15.4.6). The default settings will block all compile attempts to change formatting within the range of text within the block.

Merely by enabling this feature, you automatically opt-out of special-purpose fonts within the Preserve Formatting block. Using these options, you can selectively weaken that feature to allow some types of formatting to be overridden anyway:

• Alignment: Left, centre, right, and full justification will be passed through to the preserved block.

• Tabs and indents: Tab stops and ruler indents will not be preserved in the block.

• Line spacing: preserves any settings from the spacing configuration. This not only includes the most obvious spacing between the lines themselves, but also any offset between the paragraphs themselves.

• Font size: The size of the font will be made uniform with the text around it, but not the font family.

Hopefully one of the devs will help you.

[Mr_Monsieur]

Thanks, again, Briar!

Alas…that did not fix it. Yes…I am assuming that Ioa may show up any moment to rescue me from the flotsam I am clinging to!

[Briar_Kit]

Sorry ;(

Expect Ioa is making merry for Thanksgiving.

Good luck. Can’t be a major issue if it works in your other file. A small tweak somewhere along the line.

[Briar_Kit]

Not the actual e-reader overriding the alignment by any chance? When opened in the same e-reader, your other successful file is okay?

Clutching. At. Straws.

[Mr_Monsieur]

I hope he is making merry…I’m off to do that now, myself(!)

Yes, the other file opens fine in the same eReader…among other tools, I use Amazon’s Kindle Previewer to test eBooks…

[Briar_Kit]

Enjoy.

[AmberV]

There may be a clue in the first post:

This did not solve my problem, however: when I compile the document to .mobi, the entire document is left-aligned (even though in Scrivener nearly everything is/appears center-aligned…

If I’m to take that literally, then that could be the whole problem. Basically, to comply with Amazon’s publishing guidelines, Scrivener strips out a few formatting attributes from the most common paragraph style (>50%). Amazon stipulates that the body text of a book should not declare certain types of formatting, such as font size and paragraph alignment (these are left up to the individual reader’s settings).

And yes, that does make things difficult if you are publishing a book of centre-aligned poetry (for example), but there isn’t much we can do about it. Scrivener used to leave alignment declared, and people were getting their books rejected from Amazon as a result—so we have little flexibility here I’m afraid.

A test for that: switch the Compile For setting to “PDF” and run a test compile without making any other changes to compile settings. Do things look as you expect, in that file?

[Mr_Monsieur]

Aha! So Scrivener is saving me from myself again?! That solved the problem…thanks so much!
Happily I’m not publishing poetry, so having everything centered is not a big deal…just nice to have the title page, etc. centered(!)
Thanks again, Amber!