How do you format the text in the editor to generate a short story? For instance if I double space between exposition and a quote, will that put 4 lines when I Compile it as a short story?
You wouldn’t see a doubling of line breaks under normal circumstances. Where that could potentially happen with Scrivener is between files. A common compile setting is in the Separators compile pane, where you can insert page breaks, empty lines and even custom separators (like “* * *”). That’s for inserting new breaks between items in the Binder—not for messing with text inside your files.
There are some content tools: Transformations pane can do some common conversions for you, and the Replacements pane is like a batch search & replace function that can run whenever you compile, without changing the original text.
A nice tool in the Compiler is the “Preview” mode, selected from the “Compile For” drop-down. Using that you can quickly test settings and working methods without having to generate files and open them to see the results.
It’s also worth mention that although the compiler can do a lot of stuff—most of it is optional. You can set the “Compile For” to “Original” and no modification will be done to what and how you typed things into the text files.
So, if I understand correctly, it doesn’t really matter what formatting you use in the editor; the compiler can change it to whatever you need. Does that mean things like line spacing, etc. are more about what you like to look at while writing, than what will actually be generated?
Yes, that’s precisely the idea. Since the program is meant to be the sort of thing you’ll be living in for months at a time, you might as well be staring at a comfortable font or what have you. And for those cases where you really do need a block of text to look the way you typed it in, you can select that text and use the Format/Formatting/Preserve Formatting command. That will keep the compiler from touching any aspect of its formatting. That may be useful for your quotations, in fact. If you bake the double-spacing into the quotation as after-paragraph spacing (see the Format/Text/Spacing... menu command), it will stick through compile. Carriage returns would work as well though. 