Confused on philosophy: is Scrivener a compile-based typesetting app? or not?

Scrivener Newcomer Central
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So for writing, Scrivener seems fantastic. But I’m confused on the purpose of the highly customizable, initially bewildering, and almost-but-not-quite-powerful-enough compile features.

In the introduction of the manual, I read:

What looks great in print is not always best for the screen, so you can choose a different format for your exported or printed work without affecting the original text, and you can tailor the formatting for a particular output. An ebook can be formatted one way, a printed manuscript another.

That sounds like just what I want, especially as I go through the rinse & repeat cycle of having readers proof my work. That means I can provide it in whatever format they prefer, incorporate changes, and quickly re-compile, all without needing to repetitively edit multiple versions. Perfect!

So I’ve spent many (many) hours trying and failing to get the compile to output what I want, until I was ultimately told to send the doc to Word (or LaTeX) for final typesetting work: “Scrivener is not a typesetting application.” Uh… ok. But what happened to “tailoring the formatting for a particular output?” I mean, I’m not trying to create “House of Leaves,” here.

Fine, fine, I’ll play. But now I’ve discovered that although Scrivener has styles, and I can easily export my work to .docx format… I can’t use styles in the compile formatting. Which means that my exported work has no styles, which in turn means I have to go back to formatting every section by hand, every time, avoiding which was the point of “tailoring the output.” :confused:

So what is the actual underlying philosophy here? Is Scrivener a writing and typesetting application, or just a writing app? (And if the latter, why the investment in all the compile/formatting complexity??)

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Of course you can… in the styles pane of the compile format :
→ Double click the compile format you were previously using in the list on the left side of the compile panel. Duplicate it if a popup tells you to.

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If what you meant is that you’d wish the style assignations be preserved in some other app after compiling, then use export instead. Or use the sync with external folder feature.

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Yes

Yes, but with some limitations page formatting/layout-wise.
There are things that to attain as the final touch, one would have to turn to a wysiwyg app.
The better you understand and get used to compiling in Scrivener, the lesser though the need.

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Scrivener’s primary goal is to help users research, organize, and write substantial documents. The Compile command was originally quite basic, doing little more than stitching your Binder documents together into a single file that you could then export for final formatting in the tool of your choice.

Over the years, users have asked for more and more sophisticated output documents. Self-publishing has boomed. There’s been a resurgence in “markup” formats like Markdown and LaTeX. And so the Compile function has become more complex as users have asked Scrivener to do more complex things.

Is Scrivener a typesetting application? No. It does not attempt to compete with the likes of LaTeX and InDesign. Or, for that matter, with the more sophisticated page layout functions of Word.

It can, however, produce documents in which most of the “simple” typesetting tasks have been done: page headers and footers, section headings, section layouts, that sort of thing. For many projects, that’s enough. But the further beyond that your requirements go, the more likely you are to run up against Scrivener’s limitations. And at that point someone will suggest that maybe another tool would meet your needs more efficiently.

(Note that Scrivener in combination with LaTeX can produce very sophisticated results indeed. That’s how Scrivener’s own manual is created. But in that case the actual typesetting is done by a LaTeX engine, to which Scrivener simply passes commands.)

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By default most styles are actually compiled to output in e.g. Word. (see “Include styles information in exported file” in §24.5.5 of the user manual). Which styles are you not seeing in your output? Some things like the binder hierarchy are not auto-converted to heading styles; you can add this by adding styles in the styles panel of the compile format editor.

As to the more philosophical question. Yes, Scrivener’s compiler can perform typesetting for most common uses (but not exhaustively solve every possible problem, as that problem space is huge). BUT it is also of great value as a conduit to transform the written structure into semantic labels an external typesetting system like LaTeX can utilise (this is how Scrivener’s own manual is written and typeset). This is why those of us who use plain text output are counterintuitively even more crazy about Scrivener’s Styles, as we use Styles for building our typesetting markup.

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To the above, I would add that there are two classes of limitations that are relevant here.

One is things that Scrivener simply can’t do. Flow text around images, for instance.

The other is things that no program can do automatically. Fixing weird kerning errors and unsightly page breaks is one example of this. Because Scrivener is not a WYSIWYG editor, there is no reliable way to fix a weird page break on page 47 and ensure that it will stay fixed regardless of your output format or page size. This is the sort of thing that frustrates people who are used to hand-tweaking their layout in Word.

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Think there are dichotomic issues here.

  1. Scrivener is a research, organising and writing tool, so the focus is on writing.

  2. It can output to lots of different formats, but the problem space it is compiling to is huge (love that phrase and wish I had thought of it). Its ‘publishing’ output is good but not great. For great, use a different, dedicated app.

  3. Using styles and LaTeX, Scrivener can do more complex typesetting, but still with limitations. Again, for great, use a different, dedicated app.

For me, when a user starts using styles and quasi-typesetting options, the focus is no longer on Scrivener being a writing tool, because the publishing-focussed tools detract massively from the writing process.

Of course its possible to ignore the good-but-not-great publishing-focussed tools in Scrivener and to concentrate on research, organising and writing. But if a user is going to do that, why use Scrivener at all when other apps can do the same things as Scrivener (even if they do them in slightly different ways), they can do them without Scrivener’s overheads and complexities, they can do them in a format that can be edited at the same time by other apps (the files are not hidden inside Scrivener projects), they can do them for a lower cost to the user, they are available on more operating systems, and they can sync using a plethora of sync services—even when the files are already open and being edited on other devices.

I think the dangled carrot of Scrivener being a ‘research, write, organise, edit, style, typeset, compile to multiple formats, and then publish’ tool is followed by many users and leads to a lot of the issues (and frustrations) that we see on the forum.

The L&L homepage says, ‘From plotting and planning to penning and publishing, we help all kinds of writers start writing and keep writing.’ (As an aside, it has actually stopped me writing at times, not kept me writing.)

I think that reference—and other similar references—to publishing gives users the impression that Scrivener can do it all. And in limited ways, it can, so long as users’ output needs are simple and modest. But for anything beyond simple, users need other tools; and then they are back to the question of why they should use Scrivener at all.

I have used Scrivener since version 1. I think version 3 added styling tools and other complexities that help some users and hinder others. Only L&L can know how the cards stack up there, and even then Keith gets to decide what he wants Scrivener to look like and offer.

Think that times have changed a lot since S1. The compile process has become more powerful and more complex. Styles have brought possibilities for some and problems for others. Other multi-platform apps have come along with capabilities that match and in many areas surpass Scrivener. They also offer regular multi-platform updates.

From many of the posts I have read here and on other platforms, I think it has become less clear what Scrivener’s USP is and who its target users are. Someone answered that last point on another platform by observing that if you look at the Scrivener forum, the app appears to be mainly for retirees—although the forum might not represent the user-base well.

None of the points above are complaints. They’re just observations. I still use S3, but not exclusively as I used to and not very often.

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I use Scrivener for writing and not for typesetting. @SWM is right that there are alternative options, and I have tried a few; but whenever it comes to more serious writing (like writing a book – my writing is research-based, non-fiction), I always find those others lacking, so I come back to Scrivener.
I love styles. I don’t find them detracting at all, on the contrary. I can write my stuff in Scrivener, with no code included, and then compile it either to markdown or to latex, for serious typesetting with references etc. Or I can compile it to .doc for those colleagues who don’t want to read anything else.

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Good to hear other experiences.

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Thanks, Vincent. That was helpful. It’s embarrassing to admit but it turns out I was missing something so basic that people wouldn’t even think to describe it: once I’d defined styles, I couldn’t figure out how to tell Scrivener to apply that style to eg. a chapter heading. There are so many different ways to access things that I missed both the right-click and the little widget in the formatting pane. Embarrassing but there are so many ways to do things (eg. why can’t I use the styles pane? Why can’t I select a style in the “format/style” menu?) that it’s easy to miss the affordance.

Still glad I asked the question, the philosophical discussion really helped as well.

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There are no bad questions here.
Glad I could help.

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Forums generally are filtered by “people who have time to spend on forums.” So no, not typical of the user base at all.

People who write the support address are a much more diverse lot. Just in the last week, I’ve helped scriptwriters, academics, poets, and novelists. (Plus lots of people whose needs weren’t obvious from their queries.) And I think that’s part of the confusion in threads like this. Novelists and academics have very different requirements and will use the Compile command differently.

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Or pay someone. I think the self-publishing boom has caused people to forget that book design is a separate skill that people spend years getting good at. If you are not one of those people, the point at which you reach the limits of Scrivener would be a good time to consider finding someone who is.

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And if the ultimate destination for your manuscript is a publishing house or other entity that already pays designers, check their requirements carefully before putting a lot of work into your own layout. When I worked as an editor, the first thing I did with incoming manuscripts was run a Word macro to strip all the author’s formatting out.

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I think it’s clear to us internally: Scrivener is a tool for writing, especially for large projects, and our target users are people who do that.

Some of the most frustrated comments come from people who are not doing that, and are upset that Scrivener does not meet their particular requirements. (Often they are especially upset because the tools that do meet their requirements are substantially more expensive.)

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Exactly, as an author and publisher myself the first thing I do when I get the manuscript in MSWord is apply a standard paragraph style to the entire manuscript. A paragraph style because I do want to lose any italics put in by the author (did that once, never again). Then I go ahead and apply heading style, quote styles, etc. Once the editing is finished I load the document into Jutoh to produce the ebooks (multiple formats, kindle epub and everyone else), get the ebook cleared by the author then start the pdf for the printed version. Although Word initially proved quite adequate for formatting for the pdf I now use Affinity Publisher (a bit more difficult to set up than Word, but it reduces the manual tweeking at the end of the process to only an hour or so). There is no way that I could recommend Scrivener for formatting. Writing a book, or holding research notes, absolutely! Final formatting - never!

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While technically true, for many of the more advanced workflows it is salient to mention that, with the Scrivener post-processing system in place for markup compiles, we can effectively get a complex final formatted document automagically just by “compiling” from Scrivener. My workflow is one example in which scripts automate the transformation of the Scrivener output into PDFs or other documents directly… Such workflows eliminate the burden of post-compile formatting, at the cost of investment of time and knowledge in building the toolset to do this in the first place… :nerd_face: