So, how do I do these things as mentioned above?
my best advice is to do as i said. get rid of all the extraneous tab and new line characters. make real paragraphs.
consider hiring someone to do it for you.
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I think you are saying that I start over. Get out my paperback copy and simply retype the entire novel? How do I find someone to hire with this expertise?
That is not what he said.
He said: Manually undo/remove all those tabs you inserted, and replace them with proper formatting. (No need to retype anything.)
As for “hiring” someone to do it for you, I already offered, since it would take you hours, and I could do it in a few minutes.
Check your private messages if interested.
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reinforcing what @Vincent_Vincent said, I did not say that.
I don’t think I have been in any user group where the fellow users offer so much support to another user in need.
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I have to agree with you. Very nice.
See attached Movie. Download the zip file to Desktop and display in Finder which will automatically unzip the file “Fixing Extraneous Tabs.mov”. Play the movie file with Quicktime which is surely installed on your Mac. It is a simulation of your document with the extraneous tabs and demonstrates how to turn them into real paragraphs.
- Turn on Invisibles using Menu : View → Text Editing → Show Invisibles. We do this so that you can see what you are doing. [I keep Invisibles visible all the time when writing.]
- Select the tabs (with mouse or keyboard)
- Press Enter Key to replace all the selected tabs with the paragraph marker.
A Paragraph marker in all text editors, not just Scrivener, is a Pilcrow. See Pilcrow - Wikipedia
Fixing Extraneous Tabs.mov.zip (1.7 MB)
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You can automate this with the Find/Replace function, too.
Yes, agree. Once one sees the pattern one can use more automated methods. But one must start somewhere. I’m hoping @Rad sees this is suggestion as the catalyst to move forward on this little problem.
I already fixed all of his formatting for him. (Using automation as I described above.)
I couldn’t help but intervene seeing how much that represented a “big problem” for him at his end…
Hopefully, he’ll learn as much from it, about what is proper formatting and where he had his going about it wrong (formatting using tabs in a fixed width editor, trusting the visual result to be what he would get after epub conversion), as if he had to manually -and tiresomely- fix his formatting himself.
If not, well, that’s too bad…
I also did properly set styles where they had to be involved.
Mostly to his chapter titles (he has them directly in the editor) and some passages where the formatting is used over and over across his project (centered italic chunks of text), so he could potentially tweak his output in a global way at compile.
I think it is fair to say that we should expect him to have a couple of questions about that in the near future.
Anyways, the idea being that he felt stuck, and so I “unstuck” him.
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Questions? Of course. But firstly and foremost, thanks again. I’m still going over it carefully and do have a few questions. I like Palintino so how do I set that to be default? Also, I do like right and left margin justification. It really does look much better especially in e-book format. The only problem there is sometimes a shorter sentence gets s p r e a d o u t. So I try to fix that one sentence by highlighting it and using only left margin justification, but then the rest of the chapter says in left justification. Is there a way to only adjust one sentence? If I want to change what Vince fixed, will I need to go individually to each chapter, highlight and change to Palintino? Minor things for you experts, so I really appreciate your patience.
That’s life.
Not something that you should try to fix, as it is the result of the relationship between screen size and font size.
Meaning some of your eventual readers will get it at one place (from their ereader’s settings), some at some other places, and some maybe not at all.
There is nothing to be done about it.
For a whole paragraph maybe (tho I wouldn’t advise it), but definitely not for a chunk inside a paragraph.
That is a big “no no”. Just leave it alone.
No.
That will be tweaked globally at compile.
If you don’t want to wait 'til then, you’ll have to tweak your project’s default formatting and styles.
(As I said above, I applied styles to your chapter’s title, and your centered italic passages.)
(Those styles are also responsible for the space before and after, where before you were wrongfully using repeated carriage returns.)
→ Although the way you described would work if you later compile all sections layout to “as is”.
But keep in mind that by tweaking all of your chapters manually, you’d be taking the long run around.
Nothing to be gained, and even some flexibility to be lost.
Very good. So, for your fix, I would like left/right justification. Will I need to go through and highlight each chapter, then hit the icon to change it? Right now it is justified left and not squared up nice and neatly.
Sure you can.
Although consider this:
Scrivener is a content management software. A place to create content.
Unlike a WYSIWYG software (What You See Is What You Get – Microsoft Word, to name only one), Scrivener handles the output at compile.
Think less visually while in the editor. As in : knowing what you want it to look like in the end should be enough for now.
But here is the proper way to do it if you really want it done now :
Go to Project / Project settings / Formatting
Format the demo text the way you want your documents to look.
Then select all of your documents in the binder.
And finally, use Documents / Convert / Text to default formatting.
Downside is that the sections of your text where I applied styles won’t adapt.
(In your case that wouldn’t be such a big deal, if we’re only talking paragraph alignment and not font, since I applied styles in your project only to titles and paragraphs that were centered.)
Else, styles would need to be manually tweaked as well.
While all of that could easily wait at compile…
OK will take a look at it.
Fix stretched words and space between words following long words by adding hyphenation in Print and soft-hyphens in e-books.
I can do this in no time…
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From my understanding, soft hyphens are to decide where you want a word to split, when the word being long you can expect it to cause a problem to the previous and/or the following line if left as is.
(Or the word being so long that you know for a fact that it won’t fit a single line of its own. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. You get to choose where the line change will occur.)
But this being said, it offers no guarantee that you won’t end up with a line (before or after) where the words are spread apart.
And as for s t r e t c h e d words, isn’t that just a Scrivener’s editor thing ?
As far as I can tell, it only happens when justify alignment puts only a single word on a given line. (On a line that is not the paragraph’s last.) And which in turn implies a hell of a narrow editor.
I’ve never seen it happen on an e-reader, and it seems purely impossible to me if the user is printing in standard softcover page size or bigger.
So in short I’d say, yes, why not, it can be a good idea to insert soft hyphens to long words if one so whishes (and no need to read your whole book on an e-reader in search of odd looking lines, you just insert them then to long words where you know you’d prefer the line change to happen if needed and that’s it), but for words that end up being seperated by extra wide spaces, I still think there is nothing to be done.
Perhaps there is a way to tell the e-reader not to stretch spaces past a specific em width, that I don’t know, but if so, you would still be messing up the justify alignment.
On Kobo and Kindle, the reader can choose font, font size and justification; Apple Books lets the reader choose font and font size but not justification as far as I can see. As a result, where lines are going to break is determined by the size of the font and the size of the display. Kobo and Kindle definitely have their own soft-hyphen algorithms; Books doesn’t.
I don’t know about other e-readers, but I would expect them to follow the Kobo/Kindle model, rather than the Books model.
So, apart from publishing to Books, spending time worrying about these things in creating an e-Book is a waste of time, in my opinion.
Mark
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Stretched words are definitely not just a Scrivener thing. They can potentially occur in justified text from any word processor, and are sometimes seen in professionally published material. (Especially magazines and newspapers, which have narrower columns than books.) Typically they occur in the line before an exceptionally long word: The long word gets pushed to a new line, leaving the line it came from unusually short.
But I agree, worrying about line breaks in an ebook is probably not a great use of time unless, as in poetry, the line breaks are part of the content.