I’m quite disappointed, as I’ve been working for weeks on a short story, only to find that the finished product is missing much of the text! Lines are cut off and barely readable, and sections are divided strangely. I’ve watched videos and checked as much as I could, but I don’t see a fix for this. Am I doing something wrong?
Hi.
Are you by any chance compiling direct to print?
Regardless of your current output format (to print or not), try other formats, see if it makes any difference.
But missing text sometimes happen when compiling direct to print. If that’s your current output, no, you (likely) are not doing it wrong.
To help more, we probably need more info about what is going on. I think it would be fair to say that Compile is the part of Scrivener that people find the most challenging. Partly for conceptual reasons, partly because it is powerful and flexible enough that it can be complicated.
First thing I would check. On the main Compile screen, the rightmost panel (on one of its tabs) shows what docs/folders will be included in your compile. There is also a popup there to select/filter what to compile, e.g. the whole Draft folder or whatever is currently selected, etc. I would check those things for correctness.
It would also help to know what file format you are compiling to.
Thank you both for your thoughts. I’ve been trying to compile to pdf but I’ll try to just print also and play around with settings. I’ll come back with more details.
If a compile to PDF failed then don’t waste your time, ink and paper with a compile to print.
The issue is something else.
From what I understand about Windows Scrivener (as a Mac-user, I go by what I’ve read on these forums), it seems that there is some kind of problem with compiling to PDF, and by extension to print, so to trouble-shoot your problem, the first step should be to compile to RTF, as that involves the least processing (RTF being Scrivener’s native format) and open that in Word/LibreOffice to see if your problems still occur. If they do let us know more, with screenshots if possible.
Mark
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