Compile to PDF problem

[Maelduin]

I’m pretty sure this is a bug, rather than my misusing Scrivener; if I’m wrong, I apologise in advance. It seems to operate in both Compile sets that I’ve made myself (for CreateSpace’s standard 6"x9" paperback size, for a novel with chapters, scenes, an epilogue and a prologue), and in Compile sets that came with Scrivener.

The problem’s symptom is that at times it outputs a blank PDF, which is an icon for a PDF of 4kb.

The problem itself seems to come from Scrivener having internalised an incorrect width-heighth setting.

In the Compile menu, when this bug operates, the Page Settings pane shows, under the Page Setup button, a size of 1.42cm x 1.98cm.

When I click the Page Setup button, and then the Paper Size button

(Continuing this on the next post; the site doesn’t want me to add more than three screenshots at a time.)

[Maelduin]

…I then see the correct user-defined sizes of 142.4mm x 198.4mm.

Clicking “OK” to the two successive buttons returns me to the original Compile dialogue’s Page Settings pane, where now, the user-defined settings are listed correctly as 14.24cm x 19.84cm:

I then go on and compile the document and it compiles correctly; however, when I next go to File/Compile (or rather cmd-alt-e, the keyboard shortcut I use), again I see the same original tiny size of 1.42cm x 1.98cm under the Page Settings/Page Setup button.

[Maelduin]

And (separating this out for ease of reading and understanding), this definitely seems to be a bug; by the way, formerly, when I used any particular Compile set, the next time I opened Scrivener it defaulted to that set. Now it defaults to Custom/PDF, but with the tiny size.

I’ve tried various means of fixing this, including deleting and resetting my Compile sets, and installing the latest beta of Scrivener, but they haven’t fixed it.

[KB]

Very strange! I can’t reproduce this, though, even though I can clearly see the problem in your screenshots. I tried setting up a Compile format with exactly the same dimensions and it worked fine. Could you please zip up and send the project that is affected to mac.support AT literatureandlatte DOT com so that I can hopefully see it for myself?

Thanks and all the best,
Keith

[Maelduin]

All projects are affected; maybe it’s a hinky Scrivener preference or something? By the way, I’ve sent Astrid The Help a zipped version of a project with prologue, epilogue, chapters and scenes as you requested, for your video tutorial on compiling a novel with prologue. But I’ll also send that to the Mac help address, with the subject line “Project for Keithvin”.

Edit: I’m suggesting, really, that the preference may have gone rogue rather than being originally bad (though others seem to be having problems with compiling for PDF too).

Is there any way I can send you my Compile sets, including the native ones and the ones I’ve added?

I have been using Scrivener heavily in the last few months, with up to a dozen separate projects open at one time, relating to one book I’m researching, and to various articles I’m writing and other people’s work I’m editing.

Edit again: Another reason I suspect pref hinkiness is that running Cocktail a couple of times, emptying the Trash and restarting briefly solved this the first couple of times it happened, though not on recent occasions.

Edit furthermore: Trashed the prefs. Made no difference.

Then I went back and searched the Library for

com.literatureandlatte.scrivener.plist

and trashed the resulting preferences. But when I reopened Scrivener and went to use the Compile, there it was again:

So it’s not the preference.

Edit further: I now think the main problem is that Scrivener is not saving the Compile settings.

I saved the 6x9" settings (can’t remember the mm size offhand) in the File/Page Setup menu. When I compiled using the CreateSpace-sized compile set I’d made, I ticked “Use Project Page Settings” in the Page Settings pane, and changed the Formatting pane to tick the “Level 1 (document group)” level’s Text box, and to delete the “Chapter <$t>” in the Section Layout part of that pane.

I compiled and it was fine. Then I went to compile it again, and it had lost all these settings, again.

[AmberV]

It could be the compile settings are jammed up. You could try this (I’m assuming, based on your comments above, that you already have your settings saved to a format preset, if you do not then don’t reset your compile settings before doing so!):

1. Click and hold on the title bar of the project window, where the name of the project is printed at the very top. A menu will pop up. Select the folder directly below the project name. A Finder window will pop up with this project selected.
2. Close the project.
3. Right-click on the project in that Finder window, and select “Show Package Contents”.
4. Another window will pop up. Double-click the “Settings” folder.
5. Locate the ‘compile.plist’ file (you may not see the ‘.plist’ part). Drag this file out to your desktop.

Okay, now reload the project and try setting the compile setting that was stuck. Do a compile to make sure that works (disregard all of the other aspects of the PDF for now, just make sure the paper size works). Open the compile window again and verify that the paper size has not gone down to 1cm x 1cm!

If all of that worked, then go ahead and apply the preset you created to get all of your settings back. Since the preset is stored separately from the compile settings (is applied to them), then hopefully they will not trigger the problem when applied. If they do trigger it, then definitely send us that preset so we can play with it. You can export a preset to a file in the management screen where you created it. There is an export button at the bottom.

[Maelduin]

Ios, this seems to have solved itself, for some weird reason.

I had already trashed the preference (by going to the Library and killing it there), and restarted the computer, and then restarted Scrivener. This didn’t seem to do any good; not sure what happened next - I think maybe I rebooted again - but suddenly, it was remembering the settings when I entered them, and this time they seem, for however long it may last, to have stuck.

Thanks very much for this new way of finding the prefs, will try it if (shudder) this happens again. (Incidentally, just clicking and holding on the title bar didn’t work when I went along through part of this to look at it - but ctrl-clicking worked.)

[AmberV]

Okay, yeah Cmd-click or right-click should work. And just to clarify the compile settings are not in the main application preferences, so that reset is completely different and project specific. Hopefully you never need to use that information, however. In fact I can’t even think of a time when the compile settings have jammed up bad enough to require resetting them—but your bug was weird enough to at least try it. Hopefully it stays gone!

[Maelduin]

Hopefully!

Thanks for your help.