Creating print output for different size books for a project that contains scripts as well as prose and poetry

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I have a project that contains a mix of prose, poetry and script material. Each document within the project is a single item, i.e. either a piece of prose or a complete script and so on. I want to compile this project for a number of different target formats, e.g an A4 physical book, an A5 physical book, and an ePub reader format.

I’m struggling with getting satisfactory results for the script documents. I have used the Scriptwriting mode, with the Format->Screenwriting->Screenplay option and marked up the script material with the screenwriting elements Action, Cast, Dialogue and so on. If I then compile for a largish format (eg A4) then things work well - prose, poems, scripts all look fine. If I change to a Compile Project Format for a smaller size page (eg Paperback (5.06" x 7.81”)) then the script elements do not adjust themselves to match the narrower page. So things like Action and Dialogue go off into the right margin and indeed off the right hand side of the page.

I thought the solution to this would be to make a custom Compile Project Format baseed on the Paperback (5.06" x 7.81") and then in the settings for Compile Project Format (accessed in Compile mode by double clicking the Format), select the ‘Styles’ option (3rd one down on the left hand side) and tick the ‘Include Scripting Elements as Styles’ (accessed from the settings cog, top right). I then added (pressing the + button) a style called Action and set the margins well within the Paperback page margins (eg LH at 2 inch, RH at 4 inch). My hope was that I could then use this custom format to compile for paperbacks and the normal A4 format to compile for larger books etc. Unfortunately this did not work - the Paperback format did produce a paper back sized Word doc/PDF but the script Actions were still running off the right hand side of the page.

I was hoping that ticking: ‘Include Scripting Elements as Styles’ and ‘Include styles within exported file’ combined with the statement under the help (the ? at top right) which says “Styles defined here can be used in ‘Section Layouts’ settings, and will override styles in the compiled text with the same name’ would mean that the Scripting elements such as Action would be mapped to normal styles with the same name, and I could then define the margins in that particular style, in the Compile Format settings. But despite my efforts, I could not get this work.

Is there any way to achieve my objective? Basically, I want to compile scripts for different size print page sizes, within a single project. Or is it implicit in the Scrivener scriptwriting functions that the page size will always be something like A4?

(I don’t want to compile to Final Draft as my project also contains prose and poems which don’t sit well in Final Draft. And I don’t really want to have to seperate projects for prose, poetry and scripts and then use different compile and print chains to deal with each.)

It seems perhaps the only approach that will work for me, in this admittedly rather specific use case, is not to use the Scrivener screenwriting elements, but mark up my scripts with normal styles and then, in the compile/print process map each of these styles to a specific print style with different margins for each page size. I think that would work, but it’s quite a lot of effort to change all the script markup, so I thought I’d ask here before doing that work.

Many thanks.

Is there a way to force capitilisation when applying a style?
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That’s a narrow corner you found yourself in. :wink: Scriptwriting formats are often very much tied to the paper they are traditionally printed on, and so most of the tools surrounding their creation will not be anticipating A5 or any other radical change (A4 is close enough to Letter, thankfully).

So the problem is that this checkbox you found is solely to get the scriptwriting elements into the stylesheet—typically to work with word processor based templates for scriptwriting, and those will of course be on Letter or A4. They don’t get added to the Styles list, or the dropdown you would use to create styles, and they don’t pass through that portion of the compile process, where their formatting can be modified.

But the fact that this is indeed intended to facilitate integration with templates is a clue to how you can get them to work in your favour. You’ll be looking at something more like the workflow described in this post. That one describes the theory, it links to more practical demonstrations. I’m only familiar with the process in LibreOffice, but Word has some way of doing this too.

Basically you’re taking your text, which is marked up with styles, and inserting it into a template that is pre-designed for those styles—meaning the original formatting is kind of meaningless. You can focus less on that side of things with Scrivener, when working this way.

Thus, “Action” or “Dialogue” as styles can be in this template you create, perhaps starting with Scrivener’s output and building up from that, with the metrics tuned to interpret their original design into a smaller format. Since the checkbox styles the text correctly, in theory it should achieve that “30 second post-compile” process I describe in the linked post. I.e. a little up-front work, but once you’ve done that, this is super easy to continue using.

It seems perhaps the only approach that will work for me, in this admittedly rather specific use case, is not to use the Scrivener screenwriting elements, but mark up my scripts with normal styles and then, in the compile/print process map each of these styles to a specific print style with different margins for each page size. I think that would work, but it’s quite a lot of effort to change all the script markup, so I thought I’d ask here before doing that work.

Yeah, that would work too, pushing the formatting workload back into Scrivener. Though if you went that route, you have the solution for migration right in front of you: compile using this checkbox to A4, then copy and paste the styled text the compiler produced back into Scrivener, replacing the scriptwriting sections of the binder. Just make sure to create the styles first, so they link up by name.

A bit of work, going through all of the bits that are this way and selectively inserting them as replacement binder items, but certainly easier than flagging all of that text by hand.

I’d consider the above option first though, at least to test it a bit. It’ll be a lot easier to try out, than migrating to styles, so you’d know pretty quick whether it will work for you or not. As I noted in some of those threads, if I were a rich text writer instead of a Markdown writer, that’s the only way I would use Scrivener anyway—not just to get around little things here or there it doesn’t do well, but so that I can do whatever I want in terms of design; to not be restricted by whatever was put into the compiler.

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Many thanks for your detailed reply - lots to ponder here. I agree I’m very much in a niche situation - having looked to see what size screen plays are published in they are definitely large format - eg. Back to the Future is on Amazon as a 1.26 x 21.6 x 28 cm book. I think I’m going to go with the ‘do not use Scrivener’s screenwriting mode and just mark my scripts up with standard Scrivener styles’. As I said I have a mix of prose, poetry and scripts in a single project, and by avoiding the scriptwriting mode in Scrivener, I will then be treating each type of document in the same way - so I see that as a plus. Many thanks for your help.

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