I’m having an issue compiling a short story to a mobi file for Kindle. My first three documents before the folder with the actual story are Copyright, Title Page and Dedication Page. These have special formatting so I have “as is” checked in Compile. I have also checked “page break before” for the Title page and dedication page.
After compiling I tested the document on Kindle and found an extra page break (so a blank page) before the Title Page and the Dedication. I tried unchecking the “page break before” boxes and compiling again, but now there is no page break at all between the pages.
My separators settings in Compile have an empty line between two documents (because my short story is divided into scenes), which is why I thought checking the page break boxes would be necessary.
Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? I’ve compiled a short story like this before with no problems, but that was before the lastest update which I am now using.
This is a bug, I’m afraid; it’s sort of a compounded issue that became apparent due to other necessary changes that were made in the latest update. Setting the page break flag as you did would normally be the way to handle the situation and should work as you expect, but currently an extra blank line is getting produced which is essentially doubling the page break. Since you have the formatting set and need as-is, I’d leave your settings alone and compile to .epub, then just do a quick fix in Sigil (a free epub editor) to remove the extra blank line from the top of the documents marked “as-is” and those occurring immediately after the empty pages. Save and then open the edited .epub in Amazon’s Kindle Previewer to have it automatically converted to a .mobi.
There’s an easy fix for this problem.
Remove all the automatic “page break befores.”
Then manually insert page breaks at the end of any text where you want to start a new section in the Kindle book.
It works fine. Try it. It works.
Thanks! After checking it out, I am going to assume you mean Edit/Insert/Page Break as a workaround. (And keep my fingers crossed that this is remedied before my next project. )
John
Okay, in the Compile step I removed all the page breaks. Then went in and tested inserting page breaks after title page, dedication, and the first couple of chapters. Seems to work fine (but time consuming and inelegant, imho).
HOWEVER, now my TOC only displays “Title Page” and nothing more.
(I am reviewing the .mobi output via Kindle Previewer on PC).
Thank goodness I saved this Compile in its own preset.
Using edit/insert/page break and removing all the automatic page breaks did fix the extra page problem, but. . .
I also now can’t get it to generate a complete table of contents.
The table of contents seems to be connected to the automatic insert page breaks.
Sadly, this version of Scrivener has gone from okay to lousy, if you want to self publish your books using Scrivener.
I’m afraid I’ll have to go back to Indesign to produce my Kindle versions.
Too bad, I thought Scivener was a gold mine for creating Kindle books, but that dream fell apart.
Okay, I tried something else to fix the TOC problem.
Here’s what I did.
created a news project.
I cut and pasted ten of my chapters so far.
Made sure folder and text names were right.
Went to compile.
Set Insert page breaks to auto.
Set “AS IS.”
Then I compiled and guess what?
Got a complete table of contents and no blank pages.
That tells me that when I upgraded my project file became corrupted.
Totally weird.
This is my last post on the blank page problem.
If you do the following, you can solve the problem.
Compile to epub.
Open epub in Sigil.
Find the following code line found early in the each document:
4. Save the document
5. Open the document in Kindle Previewer.
6. Kindle previewer will convert the file and tell you where it is stored.
Now the mobi file will work without page breaks.
Can't wait for the "fix."
Still, Scrivener is easier than other methods of producing mobi docs.
Three cheers and my grateful thanks to Scrivener’s programmers for so quickly fixing this “bug.” I downloaded the latest version today and I’m a happy camper.
We shouldn’t be having to do work arounds like this! It’s insane.
I have hundreds of scenes in my book. It is an enormous manuscript. Kindle in Scrivener 3 is now putting a page break before every single scene (each new document).
PLEASE SCRIVENER can you do an urgent Fix for this!? Agent wants Kindle version but the formatting is all wrong and Scrivener 2 will not let me generate kindle format any longer.
I really dont have the time energy knowhow or will to download even more software I dont understand, as nice as it is to know Sigil is providing a fix for those who are savvy enough, and work out how to do workarounds. Please fix the bug Scrivener. There are many of us here in the forum struggling.
There simply must be a way of stopping these page breaks between scenes in the kindle/ebook compile. Surely?!
JW Nelson - I’m glad for you that you found a fix. I downloaded new version today too but I’m still having this problem. I tried to work out how to download Sigil and couldn’t for the life of me…I just scrolled up and down trying to find where to download it. then I saw that you have a fix…that you went to a prior version of Scrivener but when I do that I cant generate a kindle ebook.
All help will be so welcome. But I’m not all that savvy, not as much as many of you it seems, so please keep it simple
You are posting in a thread about the 2013 Windows version. It is completely irrelevant to any Mac version. Please post Mac-related questions in the Mac forum.
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