Has anyone had a problem where a chapter starts with a short page? It seems to force a page break. Not all chapters, either. Just 1 and 3. I’m using only 1 compile section too. so it’s not complicated. What could be doing that? Is it a margins thing? The only way I can make a difference is by using the project margins instead of the compile margins. but that doesn’t have all the PDF options for paperback compile.
A short section doesn’t seem to be generating a Page break. The settings in Separators in the Compile Format Designer do.
What is a Compile Section? Do you mean a Section Type? If those are the same for your chapters, they should be assigned a Section Layout. Maybe you use Binder Level Section Types. Is the name of the Section Type in the Right-hand side column of the Compile Overview window grey or white?
What are Project Margins? How do these differ from Compile Margins? Scrivener knows of no margins until the Compile Settings for Pages are set. There’s a margin setting for Printing. Neither have much influence on Page breaks, I’m afraid.
Yeah, probably we need to have a bit more information.
A key question is whether the unwanted page breaks you are seeing correspond to a shift from one item (folder/document) in the binder to another. If so, as Antoni suggests, your page breaking is no doubt being induced by the Separators section of your chosen Compile Format. This controls what should happen in your produced output when compile moves between binder elements – whether to insert a simple line break or a page break or what.
For example, if you have chapter folders, and within those folders you have text docs representing scenes, then Separators is making decisions about what should happen when we move from one scene to another (i.e. between docs) – probably a blank line – and what should happen when we finish with the contents of one folder and start another – probably a page break.
I figured it out… the paragraph characters must be old in my project? Or something like that. I had to define a new default formatting and replace the entire project with it. That was very difficult because just cutting/pasting didn’t do it. I’m still a little foggy on the exact reason and I could find how to see ASCII to replace them.
Paragraph characters do not age, of course, so still a mystery really. Sounds anyway like you had some unintended characters in there that were creating the problem. Glad you got it sorted.
For seeing trouble characters: there is Show Invisibles in Scrivener. For a deeper analysis, you can use BBedit in unpaid mode — it has a panel which will give you the character codes of any part of your text. Very useful.
Imagine how it would be if carriage return characters did age though, breaking down after a while, needing to be retyped to sustain them, your neglected texts becoming solid blocks. And then, slowly by slowly, your whitespace characters begin to crumble — for truly nothing is beyond the reach of time.
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