I discovered Scrivener recently and instantly fell in love with it . I plan to draft my doctoral thesis (law) with Scrivener, so now I’m trying to figure out how to compile a proper .docx (yeah I know, but my supervisor/publisher want MS Word…).
I need to use Small caps for cited authors, which normally works fine (well they end up as “fake” small caps in Word, but that’ll do). Theres however a problem: I also need word format styles, so I figured I’d add a prefix to all headers (e.g. “~H1~”) so I can later scan the .docx with a macro and replace all ~H1~with the format style “heading1”. But if I check the “Override text and notes formatting” in the compile menu and format the headings and body text, all small caps in the main text and footnotes get exported as all caps…
I’m apparently using that function the wrong way . Do you know a better way to easily apply format styles later in Word? It would be a huge timesaver if I could already assign small caps while writing the footnotes.
What method are you using to set small caps? Typically the best approach would be to use a font that has small cap glyphs, and to set that using the Typography panel from the font palette. Since this is a character format, it would need to be protected with Format/Formatting/Preserve Formatting. Optimally, combining all of this into a Format Preset so you can easily select text and apply everything in one shot.
But it sounds as though you are using something else to create small caps, because the result of the above technique getting lost in overridden formatting would be just normal looking text, not text in all caps. The actual letter case is not changing when you set the font to display small caps.
If you were using the Format/Convert/To Small Caps command, then that will cause the effect you describe, as it fakes it like Word does, by setting the actual letter case to caps and then adjusting font sizes to simulate the look. If the font you have to use for output doesn’t have a good small cap glyph set, then it’s an okay alternative—but you will still need to use Preserve Formatting if you intend to use override formatting, because font size is something the compiler will clean up, thus removing the illusion of small caps.
As for techniques to apply stylesheets, it sounds like you have a good method in mind, but I describe another common method in this thread.
that was how I did it… unfortunately, setting up a Format Preset doesn’t help me, as I cannot apply those presets to inspector footnotes and if I apply them to a inline footnote, the whole paragraph gets formatted that way. Further, the font I’m supposed to use apparently doesn’t support real small caps, so I’m stuck with Words fake ones.
I played around a bit and came up with an acceptable solution: I enclose all words that need to be in small caps with a character that appears nowhere else in my thesis (“∆TextInSmallCaps∆”). It may look a bit strange in Scrivener, but I can easily replace the formatting with small caps in Word later. Plus no need to click around while writing, I can “pre-apply” small caps in Scrivener via keyboard that way…
Great tip, that’s indeed easier (and prettier) than the whole prefix thing (“~H1~”). Doing so by hand in Word via the advanced search and replace dialog works fine! I’m now trying to pack everything into a Word macro to speed things up
Agreed, as a Markdown user that’s pretty much how I work for most formatting. But it should be noted you can use the Mac System Preferences panel, Keyboard tab, to assign shortcuts to any menu command on the Mac, including presets. I have a few aesthetic presets I use now and then and they are all bound up to Ctrl keys.
Ah true, I use inlines usually, so had forgotten about that limitation. As for the inlines, when you make presets like this that are designed for ranges of text, make sure to, upon creation of it, save it so that it only impacts character attributes, not entire paragraph settings. The icon on a preset indicates its scope. If you have it right, it should only be an underscored ‘a’.
Aaaand more things learned those custom keyboard-shortcuts will save a ton of time, thanks! I’ll probably stick with the inspector footnotes, as the main text gets a bit messy with many long footnotes. Plus I think applying fake small caps in scrivener and then exporting to word might be a bit of a risk if I ever want to change the font-size of a paragraph in word (as the different font-sizes of the fake small caps will get lost, leaving me with all caps)
. I plan to draft my doctoral thesis (law) with Scrivener, so now I’m trying to figure out how to compile a proper .docx (yeah I know, but my supervisor/publisher want MS Word…).
. Do you know a better way to easily apply format styles later in Word? It would be a huge timesaver if I could already assign small caps while writing the footnotes.
and if I apply them to a inline footnote, the whole paragraph gets formatted that way. Further, the font I’m supposed to use apparently doesn’t support real small caps, so I’m stuck with Words fake ones.