Compiling problems - chapters & section headings

I know, there are a million questions and a million tutorials. I think I’ve read them all and I’m STILL lost.

I’ve been using Scrivener for YEARS and have never cracked the secret to pretty compiling. I gave up and format in Vellum. But I wanted to export an easy epub for a couple of beta readers tonight without bothering to format the whole book.

However… I can’t send this out looking like it does. The chapter headings are a mess.

Here’s how I have the folders organized. I really only use one ‘scene’ for each chapter, so I changed those to sections. Using the folders for ‘chapter one, chapter two’ etc, works really well in Vellum. In this book, I switch POVs, so I needed the headings to state which character was narrating. Chapter One: Honor, Chapter Two: Jackson, etc.

Screenshot

Here’s what I have selected in styles:

Screenshot

Hoping for:
Chapter One
Honor

Here’s what I keep getting:

Screenshot

I’ll end up with Chapter One, Chapter One on one page and the Section title “Honor” on the next. Or sometimes I get Chapter One, Chapter one on one page and then “Chapter Two” and “Honor” on the next.

What am I missing, guys?
Thanks!

In having another look at the screenshots, there is a point of confusion in the actual structure of your project that I think may be the underlying issue. It appears you have your chapter text essentially split up between two different elements, for reasons I don’t understand. A chapter looks like this:

22019627-Scriv-chapter_separation

And that’s it, the folder doesn’t have any text in it, nor does it contribute anything to the heading that you need, because we can have the compiler generate numbered headings for us automatically, rather than laboriously doing this by hand. In essence the folder is completely useless—yet it is being injected into the output anyway using a heading style, presumably, and messing with the layout, which is using another heading style + text layout for the “Section” called “Honor”.

In short, you have way too much structure for what you really need here—you have a bunch of chapter files and that’s it, why use folders at all? Folders are for organising lots of elements so they don’t get confused with other groupings that are comprised of lots of elements.

Just use a flat list of files, and assign them the Chapter (bordered) layout. It should make your life easier when working in Scrivener as well. Instead of having 40 things to wade through for 20 structural components of a book, you have 20.

So my advice in practice:

  1. First, use File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To... and create a zipped copy of your project somewhere handy, since we’ll be making some radical changes that aren’t easy to undo.
  2. Select all of the subfiles in your draft folder with Cmd-click.
  3. Drag them all to the Draft folder, effectively moving them en masse out of their respective folders and into a flat list among themselves.
  4. Select all of these empty folders and delete them. Much cleaner!
  5. Optional: to make things less confusing and refer to things by what they are instead of whatever the default settings assumption of the template was:
    1. Use the Project ▸ Project Settings... menu command and select the Section Types pane.
    2. Click on the Default Types by Structure tab, and select “Level 2 files and deeper” within the list.
    3. Click the - button twice to remove the unnecessary complexity. You just use files for chapters… that’s all that matters.
    4. Change the default section type for “All files” to “Chapter”, and save settings.
  6. Go back into Compile. See how everything on the right-hand side is tidy, concise and now listed logically as being “chapters”? (Granted, if you skipped over the optional step they’ll be illogically referred to as “Sections”, but that may not bother you as much as it would me.)
  7. You will need to change the layout assignment so that these items use the “Chapter with Title (Bordered Heading)” layout; this will print “Nomad” below the automatically numbered “Chapter #” part.

That should look much better in testing.

Thank you – removing the folders completely works for compiling within Scrivener but causes some different problems for me.

First, I don’t understand why you say the folders are empty. Each one has a scene file nested inside. This structure (folder, then scene files inside) is depicted in every Scrivener tutorial I’ve ever watched. You’re saying if I had multiple scenes, the folders would make sense to you, but because I put all scenes in one file, it doesn’t? Why wouldn’t the foundational principle remain the same: folder contains the scene file. Scrivener should format the same whether I have one scene file or three in any given folder.

I’d argue that chapter folders are for more than just organizing lots of elements. For one, removing the files completely means I am left with a string of scene files titled w/ the POV of that chapter. Only now I have a hard time clicking around my own manuscript because I can no longer see the chapter numbers.

Screenshot: without the folders

It’ll be okay in this manuscript as it only has 50K words, but my epic fantasy works are more than three or four times this size and my entire outlining process is heavily reliant on knowing which chapter is which. If I title the flat scene files “Chapter one,” “Chapter two” etc, then Scrivener outputs a double Chapter one, chapter one situation again and I can’t have a scene header.

Removing the file folders also causes another problem for me. When I’m ready to format the book for publishing in Vellum, the software compiles all those flat scene files into one single chapter. The folders are crucial for making Vellum understand the chapter structure. I know this isn’t a Vellum support thread, but when I export the Word Doc with no file folders, I get this in Vellum:

Screenshot

That’s all 50K words in one chapter file.

This fix isn’t worth it to create a quick beta read file when I’ll just have to put the chapter folders back to format the book for publishing.

This can’t be the answer. The folders + nested scene files should work regardless of how many scenes there are.

Still scratching my head.

First, I don’t understand why you say the folders are empty. Each one has a scene file nested inside.

Sorry, that wasn’t clear, I meant the folder itself has no text content—if you were to select it and turn corkboard/outliner/scrivenings mode off, the text editor for it would be empty—here is where you could put an epigraph or even chapter notes that don’t print. Thus all the folder is providing is its name, like “Chapter Twelve”, which you get automatically added anyway from the compile settings.

Why wouldn’t the foundational principle remain the same: folder contains the scene file. Scrivener should format the same whether I have one scene file or three in any given folder.

To make that kind of arrangement work best for what you want, you’d probably want to disable Include in Compile for all of the folders, using the Inspector, and just let the files operate on their own in a similar manner to the checklist I already provided. The folders at that point would be purely cosmetic—you could even use more descriptive names for the folders that make sense for story tracking, since nobody is ever going to see them anyway.

I’d argue that chapter folders are for more than just organizing lots of elements. For one, removing the files completely means I am left with a string of scene files titled w/ the POV of that chapter. Only now I have a hard time clicking around my own manuscript because I can no longer see the chapter numbers.

Well all right, if it works better for you that way, you could try the above suggestion instead. But to me it seems there would be better ways to handle what you’re describing: like clicking on Draft, and switching View ▸ Corkboard Options ▸ Show Card Numbers and/or View ▸ Outliner Options ▸ Title with Numbers. That way you get the numbering you want—and it actually reflects the order of things rather than being typed in text. If a chapter gets inserted, you don’t have to go in and rename everything below it.

When I’m ready to format the book for publishing in Vellum, the software compiles all those flat scene files into one single chapter. The folders are crucial for making Vellum understand the chapter structure.

The only thing that determines where a chapter break is is the Section Layout you use for the things that should be chapters. They aren’t a flat list of scenes at that point, they are a flat list of chapters. The software itself doesn’t have any programming that says folders are chapters, that is 100% a matter of how you set things up.

Case in point, if you still have the template help file in your binder (with the blue info icon at the very top), then search that file for the phrase, “Working with chapters instead of scenes”. It goes provide a checklist similar to the one I provided above.

But like I say, if you find this better, it’s not the end of the world to work that way, but it’s going to be hard to split the chapter break between two different elements of the outline like you’re trying to do, no matter.

Ahh, thank you for explaining. I think I’m beginning to understand.
I really appreciate it, particularly the tip to change the cork board to show the card numbers. I can absolutely work with that.