I finished my first book in Scrivener (3.1.5.1) for Windows last week. Being new to Scrivener, I treated it like Word and formatted my content in the editor. 40 chapters later, every part of every chapter has a style applied. (H1, H2, blockquote, etc.) I’ve also used bold to highlight key ideas and italics for inline quotes. I’m ready to compile to ePub and PDF (for a print on demand book).
The compiler disregards my formatting. Bold and italicized text appears as plain. Heading 1 text appears immediately under the preceeding paragraph and with a big chunk of whitespace under it before the first paragraph pertaining to that heading. I’ve tried using the As Is style, and using Preserve Formatting. The compiler seems to ignore my pleas and do what it wants.
I’ve spent a week trying to get my book formatted properly so I can send it to the publisher. Forum posts, YouTube videos, Scrivener manual. I just can’t get it working. This is maddening. I’m so close to the finish line. I can’t finalize my cover art until I can get an accurate page count. I can’t submit until I clear this up.
I don’t see it mentioned which Format you are using, but from your description, it seems like the “Default” selection at the very top of the left sidebar is what you want, and probably assigning all of your section types to either “Text Section” or “New Page”.
The only main thing you would probably want to modify with that are the settings in the Page Settings pane, when editing a copy of “Default”, just to set the paper size, margins, and probably the headers and footers like you want?
There may be other things here and there, but that would at least give you a clean starting point to work up from, rather than trying to dismantle something far more opinionated like Manuscript Times.
Thanks for the reply, AmberV? I’ve tried ePub3 → eBook and Print ->Paperback(6"x9"). These are my two target formats. I started with the default settings. Then, I copies and edited custom versions of each format trying to get what I want.
My big frustration is the loss of bold and italics throughout my book. I notice that it’s retained in numbered lists and bulleted lists. It holds in those styles, but not in any the styles I created in the editor.
I think your problem might be that you’ve used Styles the way they are in Word; in other words all your paragraph styles include font information. Another point is that Bold and Italic are technically not styles unless you have deliberately set up styles of those names as opposed to just using Bold and Italic formatting (Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I or whatever method)—those are more like text decoration.
In other words, when it comes to compiling, your block quote style will have Regular as part of its definition, and e.g. TNR Regular is not the same member of the font family as TNR Italic, so you lose your italics and bold in the compiled text.
What you need to do is make sure you define paragraph styles[1] without font information, like so:
,
at which point the compiler will use the default font set in Options → Editor or Project → Project Settings… → Formatting, and Italics and Bold won’t be overwritten.
Mind you, this presupposes that you haven’t created a “Normal” style, rather than using either of those settings for all normal paragraphs with “No Style” for all non-special paragraphs; if you have, then you have created another layer of complexity to sort out.
[1] The exceptions to this are if you want headings, and Block Quote if that’s also important, to use a different font and size, in which case I’d still set the dropdown to “Save paragraph style” but click the appropriate boxes below.
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I was formatting like Word. I also didn’t realize the compiler Section Layouts also had their own collection of styles. So any styles in the editor were intercepted by the section styles and formatted accordingly. Now that I’m aware of that, I’m adjusting the section styles as needed. Tedious, but I’m on my way. Thanks. KG
A tip on adjusting the Format’s stylesheet is to delete a style that was provided, and then from the + button create it again, using the styles from your project in that menu to do so. This will import the project’s design settings into the compile settings. But you may want to take a look at what we did for the stock styles first, and see if there are things you’d want to change about your design to fit the “paperback” constraints. In some case it may be easier to just change what you want about what is already there than fully refresh it.
Ebooks are another matter. I don’t know how much you know about ebook publishing, but expect something a lot more like typing into this forum’s composer, and the result you get when you post, than “word processing”. The stylesheet the forum uses is largely responsible for the design of your post, and the buttons you use to add formatting hints are used to inform that stylesheet of variations, like quotations or lists. In an ebook, you aren’t so much designing what a quotation looks like, you’re telling the ebook reader that the text is a quotation, and that it should format it how its stylesheet is designed to make them look.
There’s more to it than that, to be sure, an ebook can in many ways act a bit like the forum’s stylesheet, you can make many design decisions (that’s what the CSS pane is all about). I don’t mean to compare them directly, just to contrast the overall ethos against something like Word-to-print, where every pixel on the screen comes through the way you typed it.
,