Hello, I’ve been using Scrivener to work on an ebook project for a few days now and I have some questions. First, upon compiling how do I stop Scrivener from auto-generating a table of contents? I would like to make my own custom contents, and I don’t need two tables of contents.
Second, I have made many Scrivener links that link to different parts of the book (i.e. “see chapter 2” with “chapter 2” linked so you can click it and zoom to chapter 2), but they don’t seem to carry over into the ebook file–they just turn into unlinked text. How do I preserve the links?
Third, on my title page I would like the publisher’s name to stick to the bottom of the page no matter the size of the screen it is viewed on–like a single-occurrence footer. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks for any help you guys and gals give me!
Edit: Oh, and in the ebook file, it seems to justify every line to the right edge, even if there are only two or three words in that line, which results in some glaringly large spaces. Any way to stop the program from justifying such short lines?
One more question: italicized text shows up in the ebook file but text that should be bold looks normal. Is there something special I have to do to preserve bolded text? Answers to any of these questions would be much appreciated, thanks.
In short, Scrivener isn’t really designed to finish an e-book for you, it’s designed to get all of the really technical work out of the way so that you can easily work with the final product and get it up to publication standards. Really—the same philosophy it employs across the board with most of the formats.
I would recommend using Sigil for most of this, some I’m not sure if it is possible to do. With Sigil you can work directly with the ToC file, or replace it completely. You can also adjust the internal ToC which will be used by software menus in supporting devices.
- Justification: not handled by the e-book but by the reader software, and sometimes user preference within the software. What you are seeing is probably a product of whatever you are using to preview the book. In Sigil, for example, the output is ragged-right.
- Page layout style control, like pinning text to the frame of the reader, not possible as far as I know. It may be possible to do that in a web browser, but most readers will ignore the complicated tricks required to do that.
- Bold getting lost: is the code actually lost, does the condition exist in multiple readers, or just one? It might be you are testing with a reader that doesn’t support numeric font weight assignments. I believe that is how 1.6.1 worked, and should be fixed in 1.7 if that is the case, as the output now just specifies the macro, ‘bold’ for stylesheet purposes. That is how you could fix it for now, without upgrading to the 1.7 beta.
Text-based internal hyperlinks are something we’re still working out, so don’t expect them to work.
Thanks for your reply! I have installed Sigil and think that with these programs together I’ll be able to create the right product.