I’ve been experimenting with Scrivener to see if it is the thing for me. I quite like the ease with which you can move things around, but I’m struggling with the conversion to a word document, or .pdf.
What I’d like to be able to do is have all the text come out un-indented with the folders having format according to the level of indentation.
This is so that I can have a table of contents in word, based on the heading format - and I can have the structure working.
I have seen how I can put in page breaks, and format the paragraphs, but I can’t seem to stop it indenting everything. The document I’ve been working on has a number of chapters, each with sub-headings of the different sections.
I wouldn’t mind exporting to html - but then I’d like it to have a similar structure to that in scrivener where you can have the top level folders and click on them to open the layers below.
Is there an easy way to do all this, or have I missed the point somewhere?
Paragraph indentation is controlled in two places. Firstly, in the Preferences, under Text Editing. It is set to be indented there by default. This controls what you see when you type on screen. Second, in Compile Draft, under Formatting. The formatting there controls how the text looks when you export. By default it is indented with a Courier font. If you have “Override formatting” checked, you need to get rid of the indentation in Compile Draft. If not, you need to get rid of it in Preferences. If you never like indentation, get rid of it in both. You can then save an export template so that you don’t have to do the same for every project (or create a project template).
You can also set it so that text gets indented but titles do not - again, this is under the Formatting pane of the Compile Draft sheet - just select “Do not indent titles”.
You can’t yet set formatting based on indentation level, although this has been suggested and I like the idea enough that it is on the list for future implementation, although I can’t promise that it will arrive any time soon (currently it is slated for 2.0, but it may get moved forward depending on what I decide to implement over the next year).
You can set a different title format at three levels, though - folder titles, text container titles (“text containers” are just text documents that have child documents) and text titles.
I should say that HTML export from Scrivener is pretty horrible because it just relies on the standard OS X HTML exporter (the same one used by TextEdit etc) and it generates horrid HTML. By contrast, if you use MultiMarkdown, that generates much better HTML, but that involves using the MultiMarkdown syntax in your writing.
Hope that helps. Thanks for trying out Scrivener!
All the best,
Keith
Both Scrivener’s regular HTML export and MMD’s export will create one large file out of your document, which will look roughly like the RTF by default. So it will not export multiple pages which are all linked to a central index page, if that is what you are asking.
However, this could be accomplished with a little creative CSS and Javascript using display:collapse. MMD allows you insert custom XHTML headers into the export, so you can save all of the CSS and script into the Scrivener project itself. Needless to say, it would require a little research and definitely require MMD as Keith said, the XHTML that the stock exporter puts out is not structural in the least.