Compiling a script for Word

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I use Scrivener for writing all my scripts (I love it!) and I have a few questions (although question one is the one I really need).

  1. When I’m composing I have it in Page View and I make sure I change it to A4 BUT when I compile it for Word the pages never match up. This is important because I need to know how many pages I’ve done - and also because I make sure I knock speeches on if they fall on a page break so they don’t run across two pages. What am I doing wrong?

  2. Is there any way to change the defaults to A4 rather than US Letter?

  3. Is there any way to enter your agent’s info into the meta data settings so it appears on all Front Matter pages automatically?

I have tried searching but didn’t find anything. Apologies if I’ve missed the answers somewhere!

2

Have you made sure that you use exactly the same margins in page view and compile?

3

I will check! It’s hard to locate all the various settings and one seems to be in inches while the other is in cms.

4

Margins are the same but it’s still not matching up. I’ll check indents.

5

If I remember correctly, Word for Mac uses a custom text engine, not the same text engine that Scrivener uses. As a result, there is a mis-match between point sizes in Scrivener (and anything else using the default Mac text engine) and Word.

In general, page view should be used as a guide only, not as a precise layout engine – if your final target is Word, expect to have to tweak things once in Word to get them as you expect there.

6

And correspondingly, you should not introduce “layout page break” based on the preview while you are drafting your script. That is something to do when you get to the place that you are looking at your final layout (in Word as it may happen).

gr