I have a question about how to do something that may not be possible with Scrivener, but I thought to ask. I have a document which was once intended as a single manuscript, full of many poems. Now, I would like to export that into many files, one .rtf file per poem, so that I can begin to submit them separately. The Scrivener “header” feature is a nice way to consistently include and format the address, wordcount, etc. at the top of each document, and that would be a huge time-saver for saving all my poems out to separate documents. Is there a way to do this?
While the compile format is intended to be used with iBooks Author, the “iBooks Author Chapters” setting is basically just a way of creating x number of docx files instead of one single docx file. The trick is in the Separators pane. Instead of “Page Break”, you’ll find “Chapter Break” is an option. If you set the automatic separator to insert a chapter break between each file in the draft, you’d get one file per poem (assuming they are all collected into one document and not spread out into many subdocuments). I realise you stipulated RTF, so hopefully DOCX is good enough.
This will let you use the heading features in the Formatting pane. You would just insert your boilerplate submission info into the suffix field most likely, after a carriage return. So the format would be “Title / Address Info”. If you want it the other way around, you could put the boilerplate in the Prefix, add a carriage return, and then have the poem title following. You can style the prefix, title and suffix individually in the mock editor below.
I’ve got it to work, with everything except the line numbers in the header. (here’s an example of the format I’m trying to achieve: shunn.net/format/poem.html )
here’s how I did it:
- I started from the built-in poetry manuscript template
- I used “import and split” to bring in my multi-poem document from Word
- now each poem is its own text in the manuscript
- I moved the “page header” text from out of the manuscript to be its own node, above the manuscript
- now, I can do “compile” and when i check “add front matter” the page header is available
- I can check one, or several of the poems, and export to a variety or formats. That’s nice!
- the end result looks pretty good. a few format tweaks and I should have it just right.
here’s what I still don’t know how to do
- how to export all the poems, in one step, to many files?
- how to get line numbers or wordcounts to work properly in the frontmatter?
- I tried the method that AmberV posted, and it did a nice job of compiling distinct .docx files, but I couldn’t get the “prefix” settings to create anything at all that appeared at the top of the documents’ first pages.
I tried it a few more times and I think that Amber’s solution works just great. Thanks!
I am still having trouble with the titles, which are being counted as lines, by the linecount.
The <$linecount> placeholder should only count lines within the document, not any text added to the document during compile. If for example I create a blank project with a test file that has these lines in it:
one
two
three <$linecount>I compile and get “three 3” for the last line. If I change the compile settings to add a title, I get the title and a space after it, but the last line is still “three 3”. Is this not the result you get?
I realized that I was including the titles, not as compiled information but as actual lines in the document. Once I deleted all the titles from the document bodies and then checked the “title” box in the “formatting” pane, I started getting accurate linecounts.
After 14 test compiles, I’m really starting to see some amazing results!
Is there a way to create a header that would only appear on second (and subsequent) pages? I see that there are some options for that available when you compile to PDF ( edditto.com/step-three-format-an … -material/ ) but they don’t seem to be available when you compile for iBooks Chapters?
Ah, no that is one problem of using an export mode intended for one thing, for something else entirely. 
Since e-books have no such thing as a publisher-set header and footer (all of that is controlled dynamically by the reader software), there are no header/footer controls nor page metric and margin settings.