Hi! I am new with Scrivener, and after going through the tutorial, which was clear and straightforward I attempted my first project.
The structure looks like this right now, and I am glad I tested the compile before actually writing:
(writing it down since it seems we can’t add images to posts - for what reason the functionality exists is beyond me)
Manuscript
Title Page
Scene
Dedication
Dedication
Chapter One
C1text
Chapter Two
C2text
Chapter Three
…
Chapter Eleven
My compile results are downright strange: Instead of Eleven Chapters, I have Eighteen.
The Scene under Chapter #1 appears under Chapter #6 in the PDF.
Title Page, Dedication and Table of Contents are all treated as Chapters, even though I have set them to different formats - by the way, after I define a custom format, how do I design it? Just giving it a name doesn’t seem enough.
I removed then the Title Page, since it seems the Compile function automatically generates one - so it was useless to have it.
I have also converted Dedication to File and wrote the text directly in it, but for some reason the text doesn’t show up anywhere in the compiled file and the dedication output states “Chapter One Dedication” and just that. What is even stranger is that now it appears on the title page, and doesn’t have a separate page - why?
It seems either I musinderstood some functions in the tutorial or there’s something that wasn’t so clearly explained.
My strong guess is your section types are not assigned correctly. You can check on this in Inspector Metadata and add Section Types as needed in Project settings. For things like Title Page and Dedication you may want to give unique Section Types and assign the Section Layout As Is which preserves the document formatting. see image below.
Forgot to mention, Title Page, Dedication and Table of Contents all have sepparate Section Types, that’s actually the confusing part.
Even though I set the Section Types separately they appear as chapters.
I went now and did what you said regarding setting them to “As Is” and it seems to solve the problem. Now I have the expected number of chapters and the dedication page shows up (I set this one to Page Break so that it shows up separately).
Seems I got the hang of it. Thank you so much for clarifying.
Something else you could consider, if you started with a template and are following its example structure verbatim, is checking out the help file at the top of the binder, and scrolling to the bottom about writing in chapters instead of scenes. If your example above is literal, and you only have one single text item per folder, then the necessity for using folders drops to zero. That’s a better tool if your chapters are broken down into multiple outline items, because then it keeps things neater in the binder. If each chapter is one single item though, you might as well have a flat list of them that use a Section Layout designed to print both the heading and the text (all of our built-in Formats have a layout that can do that).
Again the help file has a checklist for setting things up that way. It will make things much easier to work with all around, not only for having less infrastructure to setup with the compiler, but even just clicking on the Draft folder to view all of your chapters on the corkboard will be less of a headache because everything is right there, instead of having to drill into a folder and then back out, only to read one file.
It’s maybe worth experiment with at any rate. You can use the File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To... command and save a zipped copy of what you have right now, then try this other approach. If it ends up not working out for you, or you’d rather retain the flexibility of breaking your chapters up into more detailed outlines, you can close and trash the experiment, and extract the original from the zip you made.
