last night I downloaded the Trial version of Scrivener for Windows. I’m impressed with the way projects can be organized in the software … but so far I’m less thrilled by the Compile/Export results. Possibly Scrivener will do what I want. (I did go through the tutorial.) So I don’t know if this is a request for tech support or a request for new features.
Several problems pop up when I try to export. Here’s the most basic one:
I’m working on a novel, and I don’t like the way Scrivener handles chapter titles/headings. The default appears to be something like this (with the all-caps CHAPTER line centered):
…in 12pt Courier. I would much prefer this:
…in the same font as the rest of the manuscript. (Definitely not Courier!) It appears I can adjust the default only by clicking the checkbox for “Override text and notes formatting” in the Compile/Formatting dialog. But I don’t want to override the formatting of the text itself, for several reasons (font, paragraph indentation, etc.). I only want to override the formatting of the chapter titles. I also want the chapter titles to be in 18pt or 24pt bold, not in the usual font size, and that doesn’t seem to be possible.
Is it possible to do these things? If so, how?
It’s also the case (problem 2) that the compile/export to .odt doesn’t seem to handle headers and footers at all, nor does it format the title page information correctly. The author contact info is tossed into a table (badly formatted) at the very top of the title page, rather than at the bottom where it belongs.
What I would like would be for the compile/export to .odt to look as much as possible the way my manuscript currently looks when I write it in OpenOffice. I don’t want to have to go through after exporting and manually fix a bunch of stuff that got munched. And if I should decide later to compile to pdf or e-book, I will want those to look exactly the way I want them to look as well; I won’t want Scrivener making decisions that I can’t change.
As I said, I like this software! If it will export the way I’m hoping, I’ll certainly buy it. If not, I won’t. Thanks for any suggestions.