I’m not sure why but when the export format (PDF, Mobi etc) has been decoupled from the compile presets, which makes it cumbersome to do a batch export.
I used to have four presets:
Novel PDF
iPad PDF
Kindle
ePub
I would simply choose each preset then Compile and it would have set everything. Now I find that the export format doesn’t get saved and applied as part of a preset.
Am I missing something? Scrivener 3 is really nice, but the new Compile function has been causing me issues coming from 2. It has seemed unnecessarily different and confusing.
Also <$BLANK_PAGE> no longer works and is exported as is on the previous page in Front Matter.
<$BLANK_PAGE> does still work but it must be on a blank page for it to work. It sounds as though you have not set up your Section Layout for that page so that it inserts a page break before it.
Compile in Scrivener 3 is very different from Scrivener 2 and may be confusing for users of 2 if you come to it trying to apply Scrivener 2 concepts to it. Scrivener 2’s Compile was the biggest source of confusion for users, so we spent a lot of time redesigning it. It means that 2.x users to need to think in a different way, though. There’s a detailed transition guide here:
Regarding your main question, things have been reversed here. In Scrivener 2, when you selected a preset, that would change the selected file format. That was a bit of a backwards way of doing things. In Scrivener 3, you choose the file format and then the Compile Format you would like to apply to it. This way, different Compile formats can be specific to certain file formats.
In your case, you would want to set up your Kindle and ePub formats so that they can only be used with the ePub and Kindle file formats - that way they won’t be available when you select PDF. You will need to chose between “Novel” and “iPad” when you select “PDF” from the file formats, though, given the new flow whereby the file format is the first thing selected which then determines what formats are available.