I am working on a manuscript in which I have split some particularly abstruse paragraphs down into sentences written in individual text documents.
When compiling, I want to put those text documents together as a single paragraph, so I am looking for a compile format that doesn’t add in a separator at all.
Have tried removing all the separators from the compile settings, but each sentence is compiled on its own line.
I have made sure that each text file does not end with a paragraph return.
I can create a compile replacement to substitute paragraph returns with single spaces, but that impacts on the whole manuscript, rather than just specific sections.
In general, a paragraph is the finest granularity that Scrivener can handle separately in compile. There’s no way I know of to compile 2 consecutive documents without at least a paragraph break between.
Now that you have a draft, is it practical for you to merge your sentence documents into a paragraph document?
Yes, I could merge the files before compile, but I was hoping not to as this is very much an ongoing work between the “author” (who has hit a mental block), the publisher, the editor, and me (as the ghost who has been brought in to look for a way through the mental block).
I guess I can just duplicate the documents and merge them when I need to send drafts / proposals off, and then reinstate my working files to the binder when I need to revisit them. Would be ideal to have a compile that let me do what I want, but I can work around things.
Appreciate your help. Now know I am not missing anything obvious, and that paragraph granularity is as gritty as I can go during compile.
While you’re still working on these sentences, you could give their documents a custom compile separator character that you wouldn’t use in isolation (try holding OPT down and typing on letter keys to get easy access to extended characters that you’re unlikely to use in the rest of your document.
Then, open your compiled document in a word processor, select from the end of one paragraph to the beginning of the other (which should also include your special character), and copy that sequence. Then search & replace it with nothing.
Nisus Writer Pro has a regular expression search & replace function that lets you specify end-of-line (\n) characters if you can’t do that in your current word processor.
Nice idea, rdale. I have been gnawing away at the text today and adding 666 to the end of each sentence in Scrivener, knowing I can search and replace following compile. Adding in a custom separator for the section type would be neater.
It is possible to do this in Scrivener 3 without any workaround.
You can make a custom compile that removes the minimal carriage return between text docs. In this way you can even have sentences that span documents and which will get fused on compile. The trick is to realize that the Replacements specified in compile are performed after any custom Separators between sections are added.
Edit your compile settings as follows:
In the Separators section, find the appropriate type for the text docs you want to treat (all adjacent text files? or just adjacent text files assigned to a certain section layout?) and specify a Separator Between Sections. Set that to Custom and type something that will not otherwise occur in your text. Suppose we use the symbol ‘@’ by way of example.
Now, in the Replacements section, add a replacement entry to Replace string:
\n@\n
Leave the With field blank ( assuming you don’t want to introduce even a space character between docs). Check the RegEx box.
That’s it!
Alternative: You don’t have to bake the replacement into the compile setting is you don’t want. You could instead skip step (2) above and use the Replacements tab on the right side of the Compile dialog box instead. This would be useful if you wanted to be able to toggle on/off the fusing of adjacent docs. If you went this route, you might want to include also a replacement to replace ‘@’ with nothing. In this way you could switch the fusion on (enable the former, disable the latter replacement) or switch fusion off (disable the former, enable the latter replacement).
Login, you were nearly there. You just needed to create a distinct section type so that your replacement didn’t affect the whole manuscript. The paragraph returns you were using would have worked.