To reiterate on the status, here is the last update. To be clear for those not aware of how programming works: nobody except eccentric people make software from scratch. We use frameworks that are the result of decades of refinement. This is how we get things like scroll bars, buttons, text editors, dialogue boxes and so on.
If the bug is in the framework you use to make software, our relationship with that is almost a bit like your relationship with Scrivener. Can you fix the bug in Scrivener? You might find a way to dodge around it with features, but no you can’t.
Often for us it is much the same, we have to find ways to dodge around a bug that is one step deeper than Scrivener. Sometimes we can do so successfully, but it is not always easy. This one is not easy, unfortunately, otherwise we would have fixed it back when we looked at doing so.
I just felt that needed reiteration, and perhaps clarification, since there still seems to be some confusion over why we haven’t fixed something that isn’t actually in Scrivener.
To round up the fixes that have been shared:
- Search and replace fix in Word.
- Using best practices instead of Scrivener’s basic formatting. Under ideal circumstances this shouldn’t be a problem, in my opinion, because unless you just need a quick and dirty output where empty lines like this actually do not matter one bit (a proofing copy for example, or a manuscript you’re sending off to a publisher that will clean it all up anyway), you shouldn’t be using quick and dirty formatting tools like manual page/section breaks, but letting the template’s stylesheet drive almost all formatting. That post goes into the details.
- A Visual Basic macro to clean the output.
- Another Visual Basic macro.