About a year ago I compiled a novel into a word file with no problems, but now the entire text is always fully justified, making spacing a complete mess. (I think I used Scrivener 1 rather than the beta, but at this point I can’t remember). Trying to justify left in Word doesn’t do anything (literally, clicking on it does nothing), and I’ve tried everything I can think of in compile with layouts, formats, etc, but it always turns into this mass of text with neat page margins and wildly different word spacing, which, somehow due to the formatting imposed by Scrivener, can’t be altered by anything I do in Word.
Edit: I found a workaround by compiling to an .odt file, then opening that with either Libre Office or Word, both of which have normal formatting, so the problem definitely seems to lie in compiling from .scriv to .docx.
Likewise, for Scrivener, select text and use Format->Paragraph->Justify. You can set that globally in the settings for the app, or just for the project under the Project->Project Settings menu.
Yeah, those were the first things I tried. Clicking on the left-to-justify or selecting it from the menu in Word literally made no change, and wouldn’t even highlight the icon to show it had been selected. I tried to select “full justification” to see if I could change it back again, but all it did in word was move everything to the left side, including chapter titles and section break marks. Selecting left-to-justify after that only reverted it to its weirdly justified state, moving chapter titles and section break marks back to the middle, and keeping everything else fully justified.
And the formatting was normal (left-justification only) in Scrivener, so there was nothing I could change. I tried several ways of “keep source formatting” while compiling, but they all led to the same result. I tried to compile to a docx eleven times with different settings each time.
Like I said, it compiled completely normally to an .odt file on the first try with the default “keep source formatting” settings (including when I open the .odt file in word), so I suspect it has something to do with how it interacts with Word10.
The fact that it comes out of Scrivener this way might be a bug in Word’s interaction with RTF documents. https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/compiler-compiles-to-fully-justified-text-help/28967/1 This info may be out of date, but it’s something to try at least. One of the suggestions is to re-save the Word document, making sure it’s in DOCX format; often, the way you get something into Word from programs like Scrivener is to just rename the RTF output to have a .docx extension (with some other added ingredients, I’m sure), and let Word do the final conversion to its native format. It could be that the main issue is that it’s still technically in RTF format until you re-save it in Word.