Hello everyone. I’ve purchased Scrivener last fall and now ready to compile a ms into a document on my document? I did check Scrivener help. But I still not sure how to do it, including adding headers and page numbers on top? All of my scenes and chapters will be included into my ms. Is it easy to do?
It’s not too difficult, but you have to be methodical about it. I printed out the section of the Help file covering compiling and, for the first few times, referred to it as I went through the Compile panes one by one. It’s pretty logical.
Header and footer configuration is something you will find in the second tab; lower-right quadrant. You can use the [b]<$p>[/b] token to add page numbers and anything else you type will be ordinary text, placed on each page (with options to exclude the first page, if you have a title page).
For titling, take a look at the first tab, again in the lower-right quadrant. There is a matrix of checkboxes which enable various elements that can be added to the compile, for each of the three “types” you’ll find in the Binder. If you never organised text files within text files, you won’t see any “File Groups” and can safely ignore that column. If you used folders to represent chapters and text files to represent scenes, you can decide here which should export text and titles. Don’t worry too much if you weren’t strict about folders and files meaning anything in particular as you worked on your project. In the Binder, you can right click on items and convert them to folders or files.
The formatting tab is where you will set up how these elements look, if you have “Override text formatting…” enabled at the top of this tab. You can choose to change the entire look and feel of the document if you need to, or you can leave that off if you formatted it to spec in your project as you typed. The title fonts correlate to the three columns in the matrix from the first tab. This lets you set a different title style for each type of binder item. For example, if folders are chapters you could make that large, bold and centre aligned. If you want scene titles, you could set that to be a smaller bold title that is left-aligned—whatever you want.
Click around and explore the various options. Most people need to compile a few times to get a handle on how it all fits together. It isn’t a destructive process so you don’t have to worry about making mistakes and trying a few times.
Thanks so much for your help. You were helpful with your tips.
You’re welcome!