Been using scrivener for near on a year now, loving it to bits. I’m currently formatting a user manual for a game and I’ve run into two problems that I couldn’t solve on my own.
First. Can you layout text in columns somehow? I would save a ton of space in my manual if I could do a two column layout on the page. For an example of what I mean. Check out the content pages in the Scrivener manual -> literatureandlatte.com/docum … ual-a4.pdf
Second. Are there more footer and header tokens available than those that are printed in the manual? On page 394 in the manual(p. 402 on the PDF’s counter). <$sectiontitle> prints the title of the last binder item that used a pagebreak but I would like a token that just prints the name of the CURRENT binder item. Is there such a token?
Yes, you can set up columns for the word processor formats in the Layout compile option pane. There are a few simple options provided, such as the number of columns to use, how much gutter space should be placed between them, and whether there will be non-columnar output for introductions, abstracts or other material.
No, because at that point in the output Scrivener has no clue what page these binder items are on. Adding sections breaks at a page break is a reasonable and safe assumption because that is the one and only place where Scrivener has any notion at all of pages. Otherwise it is oblivious to what sheet of paper content X is on, let along that it is the first binder item generating content on page 298 in a list of 15 binder items also doing so (to provide an extreme example, like a glossary of short paragraph length binder sections).
Thank you for your answer. The reason I did not find it was that the Columns option doesn’t show up when compiling a PDF.
I thought that scrivener would sort out what content was on what page during compilation and then set headers and footers but I appreciate that there’s probably a lot more coding than it first seems with a feature like that, supporting variable page sizes et al.
It can do a fair amount of that, but in most cases we recommend Scrivener as a drafting tool rather than a publication tool. You can for example set up headers and footers in the Page Settings section of the compile pane. Page breaks can be set up in the Separators pane (or individually toggled in the Inspector for each item with the “Page Break Before” checkbox. In practice many people find Scrivener is enough for what they need, but once you start getting into specialised formats like columns and text flowing around images—that sort of thing is going to be best done in a program that does page layout and design.