This is general “feedback” about the compiling function. I wouldn’t know how to narrow it down to a specific question. I’ve used Scrivener for more than 10 years and to this day, any time I try to compile a project, it’s like two days of futzing around and rarely getting the results I intended. I try to “format” stuff and all I can think is, This is bogus, what kind of an interface is this? Who invented this thing? It’s totally cryptic. I can do tutorials until I’m blue in the face, I can’t really apply what I’ve learned to my specific needs – the various steps rarely translate into what I expect from the interface or the instructions. Feels like an obstacle course of some kind. Never mind that it’s so counter intuitive, I usually forget the half of it between projects. I like writing in Scrivener but what’s the point if I can’t compile the end result even semi-successfully without jumping through hoops and loops first.
BTW, I don’t think I’m technically inept. I’ve used much more complex programs in my day, but this is really beyond the pale.
The fact that you claim to have to redo it all over again with each new project shows that you actually missed (or misunderstood) a big chunk of it.
(Just sayin. No judgement.)
Technically, you tweak (or not) one of the compile formats, and reuse it. Either as it is, or as a starting point for a slightly different project.
Unless you regularly go from writing novels to scientific essays to poetry, you should be fine with pretty much the same compile format over and over.
I would phrase @Vincent_Vincent’s comment a bit differently. The whole point of the Compile command’s design is that, once you’ve got a Compile Format working the way you want, you should be able to use it repeatedly for similar projects with few or no changes.
Without more information about exactly what you’re trying to do, it’s hard to offer more specific suggestions. But I might start by asking what sort of projects you’re dealing with. A short story or a newspaper column will obviously use a much simpler Compile Format than a technical textbook with lots of references and images.
I’ve been doing what you say, i.e., tweaking the existing presets or saved presets, it doesn’t always make my changes implement or lets me modify prior changes I’ve made earlier.
As for my lack of understanding or short term memory, that’s what I mean about it being counterintuitive. It shouldn’t take this much effort to learn or recall a single function in a program I’ve used regularly for over 10 years. I don’t think I’m the only one having this issue, though maybe my expectations are higher. I don’t like to have to spend days on end on something that should be a given.
Hey brb. I’m no genius, I feel your pain. I had a lot of difficulty compiling a collection of short stories. I understand your disdain for tutorials, but what worked for me…Every day for a week straight, I went through the four ‘Compiling’ videos, again and again, while I worked on my project in a separate window right next to it. Eventually, everything clicked and it began to make sense. Maybe give that a try.
Not to pile on here, but I second richdees’s suggestion to compile frequently as a way to get settings tweaked just right and keep the compile skills honed.
I’m also a fan of testing any compile changes I want to make with the Interactive Tutorial first. That takes the pressure off because I no longer feel like I’m going to “break” my project. I can fiddle with the Tutorial, make some changes until I think the compile settings are right, and then test my actual work with those settings.
I’ve also found that I need to keep notes on the changes I make to my customized templates and perhaps give each a name that helps me recall which type of project/out file I used it for.
In other words, I have the built-in templates Scrivener provides, but also my own flavors for “Short Story PDF”, “Short Story DOCX”, “Blog Post RTF”, and so on. I save them to the “My Formats” area in Scrivener so I can use them in multiple projects.
If I’m deliberate and thorough in my naming and in documenting my settings changes, it helps me feel less frazzled if I’m facing a deadline and need to get a draft compiled quickly.
I am sure the group here would be happy to try and help with any specific problems you are having in the category.
As you no doubt know, Scrivener allows a workflow that pretty much bypasses all the complexity of Compile. If you use the Default compile format, you can pretty much ignore the ins and outs of Compile. This sort of as-is compile can be finish-touched directly either in Scrivener’s editor or in post-processing in another app. Just thinking working this way might be preferable for you?
(FWIW, I am confident that L&L know that Compile is a challenge for a lot of people. In a user survey some while back there were significant questions which reflected some serious thinking about this part of Scrivener. What becomes of that thinking we will have to see.)
I doubt my post is going to help, but I’ll express an opinion.
I used Scrivener for years before needing to compile. And when I did, and when I needed things to be just so, I felt similarly to the OP.
My view is that compile should be a separate app/program, so that it has more screen real estate to communicate the current state and the actions that can be performed. Currently, compile is constrained to a series of small dropdowns that you have to click into and out of over and over again. It’s undeniably a frustrating experience till it clicks.
However, leave it alone for a few months, or years, and the hard-won knowledge fades, and the frustration recurs. Intuitive it is not. But it works… eventually.
You could have compiled every day all that time, just changing one setting each time to see its effect. Ten stress-free minutes a day, and you’re a Compile expert before you even need it. It has plenty of screen real-estate as it is, and it’s only as complicated as it is ambitious. Scrivener does a hundred things Word does not, so it has a lot of settings.
I’d like to thank everyone on this thread for taking the time to reply to my post.
That being said, I wasn’t really looking for advice, I’ve already tried most of what people suggested, and it hasn’t got me very far. I spent 3 hours yesterday trying to tweak a pdf compile I saved only a couple of weeks earlier, also after a few hours of futzing around. Doesn’t seem right. I’ve got other things to do in my life, I can’t be spending all this time just on exporting a file or learning how to do it --again.
I get from most of the replies (and from people outside this forum) that I’m not alone in this, but I have no idea if the Scrivener designers are aware of it, or even care. Or maybe it’s just that notions of usability and being user-friendly in tech have fallen by the wayside in recent memory, and this is a glaring example of that. I thought I’d offer “feedback” as a way to get the attention of the design engineers, but I guess that’s not what “feedback” means in this forum.
Both @RuthS and I are L&L employees, so you’ve certainly made the company as a whole aware of your concerns.
The issue, though, is that nothing you’ve said is really actionable. Without knowing what specific task you are trying to accomplish and what specifically is giving you trouble, it’s hard to know what to change. “Compile is hard” may be a true statement, but so is “the Compile command is very powerful, which is why it has a lot of options and can seem complex.” The design challenge is to improve usability without removing functionality that people rely on.
If you’d like to send more specific feedback, perhaps including a sample project, you’re welcome to open a support ticket, here.
I’ve asked a lot of tech support questions in my day and answered probably just as many. It’s often just as time consuming as troubleshooting things myself. It’s not like I didn’t know I can post here about specifics or look up tutorials, or whatever, but that wasn’t my goal.
I just wanted to give general feedback, knowing I’m not alone in this predicament. I am not sure how relating the specific issues I stumbled upon is going to help make the program more user friendly. You’ve got this forum, you can look up other people’s queries and/or use your mailing list to call for feedback if that’s what’s required to figure out how to make something more user friendly.
I would love to tell you why I think the interface is so cryptic, but I am not a developer and don’t have anything to compare it with. I think I’d have to understand why it is the way it is first, before I could offer any constructive critique.
And yes, I recognize the program is powerful, but I don’t see why user-friendly and powerful shouldn’t be able to reside in the same place together. Do you think, by definition, they must cancel each other? I kinda doubt that.
In any case, my recent compile efforts weren’t particularly complicated that I needed all that “power.” Just a pdf with a bunch of documents and a table of contents, and a separate pdf with an outline for the same project. I ended up compiling the outline into Word and tweaking it there. The main project was too long, so I had to figure it out within Scrivener. I am not discounting the possibility that the program works just as intended and I am just a total moron for not getting it. But again, that’s not why I raised the topic.
Like I said, I’ve used Scrivener for more than 10 years and in all that time, it’s given me very few headaches and only one or two corrupt files, despite some very long projects on not-so-powerful computers. It’s been a good ride, except for this function. But given the pushback I received here, I guess I won’t be bringing it up again any time soon.
Thanks again for responding, but all that stuff has been said before.
I guess I haven’t made myself clear, I can’t explain what’s not user-friendly exactly by specific examples, it’s just like drilling into detail that doesn’t work-- okay, I solved it, now what? It doesn’t make it easier. I also as a layman have no idea what “user friendly” would look like in this program. I also can’t use the defaults “as is” because none of them fit exactly what I need, I still have to tweak them.
Yes, I end up compiling stuff, but it’s like doing it in the dark. So good for everybody who mastered this function and think it’s all good. I don’t want to engage on this issue anymore. It’s clear to me what the consensus here is.
I’d like to put a pause on demanding specifics. If someone makes it clear that isn’t their aim or what have you, then continuing to prod for them and saying there isn’t value in their feedback until they do is a bit disrespectful.
I do have stuff to say, and I’m still going through how I want to say it, but suffice to say in summary, I think there is a lot of nuance in this that can’t just be summed up with simple concepts of what is or isn’t “complicated”. From a certain perspective we could consider correctly cooking rice to be complicated and “counter-intuitive”. The perhaps naive but intuitive way of cooking rice results in a goopy gruel, but the chef that knows the chemistry and reactions involved is going to feel that what is intuitive results in correctly cooked rice. Hopefully that simple example illustrates why I feel this isn’t something that can be simply argued one way or another.
Here are two compile formats along those lines, both from the same content. I think examples are the best way to show anyone how to think about Compile.
Yes. An expert’s “intuition” will give completely different answers from a novice’s, in any field.
FWIW, many difficulties that people have with Scrivener are traceable to their “intuition” – based on experience with other programs – being incorrect. As I have said elsewhere, it sometimes helps to remember that the creator of Scrivener didn’t like Word, and didn’t think emulating “how Word does things” was necessary or even preferable.