Is it possible to eliminate the document separator between certain (but not all) documents when you compile? Sometimes I want the extra space break between documents, and sometimes I don’t. Am wondering if there is a way to specify this in the document or compile settings, as opposed to having to go back and fix it laboriously post-compiling, which is what I do now.
Obviously one way to do this is to make the two documents I don’t want separated into one longer document, but for various reasons I would prefer not to do this.
I’m not an expert, I could be wrong and there may be a better way to do this…
Perhaps go into File > Compile > Separators and set Text Separator to Single Return (i.e. no empty line between adjacent text documents), then literally go into those text documents that you want followed by a blank line and type one in there at the bottom (go to end of text and hit return).
oh! that’s a good idea! I’ll try that next time, thank you!
If anyone knows a simpler way, of course please say–but that’s an improvement over what I’ve been doing, which is both tedious and has to be re-done every time I compile.
Just thoughts — I haven’t tried to do it and nothing I’ve compiled in my long use of Scrivener has required me to do this:
If you made the documents you don’t want to have the separators on as children of the first — highlight them in the binder then use the keyboard shortcuts to move them right, they would be at a separate level re compile … would you be able to mark them as “No separators”?
If you made the first document in the series into a folder — ‘Documents —> Convert —>’ — would you then be able to set "Text to Folder” with your separator, and “Text to Text” with no separator?
Final, more drastic solution, use “Merge” to merge all the documents where you don’t want a separator into a single document; more difficult to undo, so keep an un-merged backup.
These look like some great possibilities–thanks so much for taking the time to come up with them. I will try them (except the Merge, probably, as I don’t want them merged.)
Incidentally, the reason I need this function: this is a novel, and novel convention is to have a separator between what in a film you might call scenes when there is a jump cut in time. But some of these scenes are pretty long and complex, so for writing and revising purposes it’s useful for me to keep them in several smaller documents. I didn’t realize that I might be able to lose the separator line if I made them children of the first part of the scene–I’m going to try that!
Depending on your binder structure, you could create a new level of document that serves only to provide separators. Title them ***, and then set that level in the Formatting pane to just be centered titles, no text or anything else.
If you don’t want the *** separator, but just a blank line, here’s a neat trick: In the Replacements pane, add a line to replace *** with an OPT-RETURN keystroke.
Note that the *** files are level 3 documents, and the preceding “parent” scene documents would be formatted using the row represented by two pages stacked together, not the rows with the one-page icon, so you’d have to copy whatever formatting is currently being done for level 2 documents.
If any of that makes sense, then I have a suggestion; create a document template for scene documents, add the *** document as a child of that template. Whenever you create a scene file from the template, it will automatically add in the *** child file as a separator. Then you can just delete those files where you don’t need separators.