Hi,
Spent hours trying to tweak the compilation of some 150k words manuscript, into MS Word docx - the last thing I can’t get right is the chapter & section break.
Scrivener, God bless his soul, insists on creating new chapters out of every file and/or folder, throwing paragraph separators in all over the place (or omitting them entirely) - I just can’t get it right, nor find a resource that’ll tackle my issues.
So, here’s how my manuscript is setup:
Scrivener UI
Lingo clarification: I refer to each folder as “chapter” (1, 2, 3…), and the files within each folder are “sections” (each file contains text, separated into paragraphs by blank lines)
After a Compile, I’m trying to get the docx file to look like this:
Book I - would be nice if it’s “Part One” on a separate title page, but that isnt important - the whole manuscript has 2 “book”, I can fix it manually in the docx
1 - that’s a chapter containing a single section. I would like the docx to show the default Scrivener chapter heading (“Chapter ONE” or some such) . The test (from file “Preface”) will show under the chapter heading.
Also important: the file (as all files) contains paragraphs, separated by a single blank line. The docx should only show a blank line between paragraphs (in some cases there’s a “# # #” added between paragraphs)
2 - that’s a chapter containing 3 sections (three files). It should look like:
- chapter title (“Chapter TWO”), on a new page, starting at half page or so
- file “hi-tech argument…” - starts right under the chapter’s title
- file “2nd dream…” - a new section, still in chapter 2. It’ll start under the previous page, separated from it by three lines: a blank line & section separator (“# # #”) & a blank line
- file “bang head…” - a new section, the same rules as the previous section apply
That’s it, seems pretty simple to me, but so help me God I could not get it right.
Additional info
Scrivener version 3.2.3
There are no special styles - the whole project is in the default format.
In the compile settings, it’s only Chapter Headings and Sections. All the way down. Like that:
If someone can help me get even close to what is described above I’ll be ever grateful - it doesn’t have to be exactly as described.
Thanks!