Hello!
I am trying to format my Compile settings so that my Title Card appears on a recto page. I want my book to have an empty page on the verso side and the title card on the recto.
When I go into the compile settings and choose for ‘Start Section on Recto’ and then ‘Start New Section on Recto’ the section still starts on the verso page after compile!
What can I do to fix this?
Thank you!
I can reproduce this. I don’t know how to make it work. I also found this ominous line in the Scriv documentation: “At the end of compiling the text, Scrivener goes through looking for potentially blank pages and removes them.” Um, what?
If you are just trying to get this to happen at the very beginning of your book – for your title page (sorry “title card” doesn’t quite mean anything to me") – maybe just force a page break? (Strangely, setting ‘Page Break before section’ for the section format of my test title page document also is not working for me. 
)
Note: if this is for a pdf which will be printed as a for-real physical book, note that you need two page breaks at the start.
How does one set two page breaks at the start and before the title page?
If it’s the first page in the book, it’s automatically recto. Do you have something before it?
I give all the front matter documents a section type I call “page”. It’s set to Compile As-Is with a page break as separator.
You can make a blank page by putting nothing but <$BLANK_PAGE> in a document. You shouldn’t need one, but that’s the way to get one. (You can go to Help to find a list of all placeholders.)
The second setting is Start NEXT section , not NEW section. Is that the confusion generator? Anyway, I wouldn’t use it. If the next page needs to start recto, give it a section type that starts recto.
Hi! I still have not solved this!
Start Next Section is set to Recto and Start New Section is also on recto, but both sections end up being on the verso page in compile!
On what basis are you judging this to be so? As dMbob points out, your first page is automatically recto.
(Not sure if it is relevant, but there is this setting in compile format settings: Page Settings > Use facing pages. Sounds like that should be turned on (otherwise, arguably, there is no such thing as verso and recto distinction).
No, there is a distinction. With or without headers and footers, odd-numbered pages are recto and even are verso.
Am I confused? When I compile my book and use the Preview app for ‘Two Page’ display, both the first page and title page are all on Verso
[UPDATE: What I say (so authoritatively) here is incorrect. See Sobs corrective post below.]
Yes, you are confused. Preview’s two-up display is doing nothing more than showing you two pages at a time. It is not showing you page spreads in the typesetting sense. In fact you can page around in Preview and any given middle page can appear on the left or right. Preview does not know what a page spread is.
If you sent your pdf to a book printer, guaranteed that whatever is the first page of your pdf will get printed and bound as a recto page. dMajBob made this point earlier. The literal first page of a book could not be a verso page, because that would imply there was a page before it!
However, you will notice that in Preview if you are at the start of a pdf viewed two pages up, the first page will be on the left. Thereby showing you that Preview is not representing to you the page spreads of your to-be-printed book.
Huh. I never really thought about it, but now I wonder if in inDesign you choose in the document set up not to use facing pages, would the app still respond to the setting to make sections start on recto pages. I guess it only makes sense that it would, insofar as the intent might still be for print.
gr
Every PDF opened in Preview and viewed as ‘Two Pages’ (CMD 3) will show the first page by itself (which is recto by default for dextrosinistral works) and then show the second page as verso, the third as recto, and so on, just like opening a book or a magazine.
Sample attached.
recto.zip (164.1 KB)
So the problem here for me is my book starts in the right page and the next page is the tittle card page. I just want to make sure the title card appears on the right page and not the left.
So, you already turn a page before my title card if that makes sense. Is there a preview to see things how they would be in a book?
For ebooks, preview using whatever reader you plan to distribute for.
For print books, a print-on-demand press should allow you to review a proof copy.
For commercially published books, it’s the publisher’s job to get this right.
This should do it for you…
The sample project in this post has the title page set to compile as a recto page. Just follow that example and all will be okay.
Think of it this way:
In theory, the publisher can bind the first page in several ways:
When you view the book in Word or a PDF viewer, YOU also have choices. Here’s a possibility, where it looks as if the title page is verso:
Here’s the setting I can use to change that:
And here’s the result:
And that’s the way it should look when printed.
You seem to have a page before the title page, however. The thread has gone on for 4 days now, and I’m certain we could solve the problem in a ten-minute Zoom session:
Introducing me to Acrobat and explaining that I had the cover before the title page fixed everything for me! You’re a massive life saver and this makes so much more sense now. I appreciate your patience <3
I’m glad it helped.
I compile the cover before title page in PDFs for myself and beta readers, but I wouldn’t send them to a publisher that way. We still could have moved the title page to recto, though, even with the cover page.
If by “cover” you mean the cover art of your book, yeah, that should be in a separate file entirely. The cover of your book is not even the same dimensions as the content, since typically, the front+spine+back are a single graphic. Even the dimensions of the front and back will be a bigger than dimensions of the books inner content.
But all these things should be explained somewhere by the print service you mean to send your book to, for example <lulu.com>
