Hi all,
New to Scrivener, quite liking it, though I think my use case is not Scrivener, but I am sick of Word/Writer.
I am trying to update my CV, and thought that Scrivener would be a good way to do it, only I have hit three formatting issues. None are show stoppers as such and it looks like once I get the hang of complaining I can even maintain different documents and select them in an out for different jobs.
So first question, Headers, the headers don’t seem to be part of Scrivener main flow, I seem to only be able to set them when compiling a document, is there anyway to align the header centrally on the vertical axis?
Second I have a Document with a section heading and inside that document I have more documents with sub section headings. The section heading is in 16pt and as its the only thing in that document (other than the sub documents) I get a big 16pt line gap between the Section heading and the subsection heading of the first sub document. Is there a way to tell Scrivener not to include a blank line at the end of the section, but to keep it for the the subsections and other sections?
Finally, I have my ruler set to centimetres, yet when setting line space via the format menu, the fields are all in points. Is there away to have these set to centimetres?
I would also like to say thank you for a great product, it is not quite what I want in the formatting department, but having used it for a few hours, I have really enjoyed it, it has some quirks, but I am finding the way it holds sections/documents with the texts and notes about the section/text to be brilliant and really quite powerful.
In the “Page Settings” compile option pane you’ll find where headers/footers are set up. Note how there are six fields; these correspond to left/middle/right, for each type. This way you can have a page number on the right and the document title on the left, for example.
Otherwise you are correct, and in fact everything involving the final document is handled in the compiler, even optionally all the way down to which font is used to print the text. The main Scrivener window has very little to do with a document, it is rather a composition area for the content that will eventually be compiled into a document.
It’s hard to say precisely without seeing your outline, but have a look at the Separators compile option pane. You may find a combination here that works for you. If you can’t—and sometimes there just isn’t a way to automated this—that’s fine, then you’ll be best off just setting them all to “Single return” and handling the empty space yourself in the text editor if you need them.
Incidentally you may also want to check out the Formatting pane, where you can have the outline elements print their names as formatted titles. You can even do this by indenting levels, so that a folder directly beneath the draft (level 1) uses a larger font than folders at level 2 or greater, just to provide a simple example. The section on compile formatting in the user manual documents this pane, in §24.11 (starting on page 371).
There isn’t a way of switching that. Points are the default unit of measurement when working with typesetting and font metrics.
Glad to hear the program is working well for you. As you note it’s really more set up for larger works, and so using it to specifically format a small document like a CV is a bit on the edge of what it is designed to to. With that said though, I think it can work well for this so long as nothing fancy is required (usually not, save for in design fields where a crazy CV is considered part of one’s ability to design things).
I had found the header and footer bit in the compile options and while it allows me control over horizontal placement, not it seems over vertical place. Never mind it was a small thing anyway and I can always play with the page merging
So, converting the document that had sub-documents into a folder allowed me to treat it differently from the other documents (I so want to call them sections) and allowed me to get the formatting I wanted. Thank you for your help with that. It was so obvious, and being a developer I should have seen that a folder was what I wanted.
From one perspective Scrivener is over kill for a two page CV (the rough rule of thumb apparently) but, even before you consider the issues Word/Writer has with maintaining style, and conversion between ODF and DOC, having the ability move section around by drag and drop, being able to have different sections for different sectors and being able to just choose to compile them in or out is brilliant and thats before you get to use the research section and notes section to record experience that you might wish to include in your CV is also a win, and will hopefully making keeping the CV upto date easy. Something important happens make a note of it in project, and when it comes time to send out a new one everything is there.
Having recently been involved in the collation of a “big up front design” document in Word, I can see how helpful and powerful the tools Scrivener gives you are.
