Help with new compile formats

[TactualRain]

I’ll admit it, the new system has me totally confused. I’m having real trouble with the tutorial helping me move from Scrivener 2 to 3 compilation.

Learning through doing is a thing, so can anyone help me with the following setup? My project looks like this:
[attachment=1]Screen Shot 2017-11-23 at 11.59.10 AM.png[/attachment]

I would like compiled documents to work like this:
Parts at the root (e.g., One Good Lead) have their title as the chapter name.
Sections (e.g., folders 1, 2, 3…) have their chapter name as CHAPTER ONE, CHAPTER TWO sequentially (regardless of the name).
Parts (e.g. 1, 2, then 1, 2, then 1) are inserted into the chapters as text.

This was pretty straightforward in Scriv 2, but I’m going insane trying to work out how to do it. The tutorial doesn’t go into enough detail for me (hint for the future: screenshots and examples would be a huge help), so it’d be sublime if someone who’s mastered this could say, “Oh, right, you need to do it like this.”

I’ve managed some success but am stymied at a few points.
How do I get chapter names (“one”) instead of numbers (“1”)?
How do I get Scrivener to stop putting section breaks between everything, even front matter? Old behaviour felt like it was just between sections of a similar chapter.
How do I get Scrivener to start page numbering from the first part of the book, excluding front matter?
How do I get Scrivener to name “One Good Lead” as the chapter name, and start numbering from the next?

Pictures speak volumes, so as an example this is what I’m seeing. I’ve got the fonts right, but that’s about it

[attachment=0]Screen Shot 2017-11-23 at 12.44.32 PM.png[/attachment]

[AmberV]

When I initially sat down with the first working build of the new system it took me a while to “get it” as well—and I even helped put the idea of it together on paper! I knew it inside out before I ever used it. There’s a lot of old Scrivener 2 hardwiring I had to undo in my head before it felt natural—and for a spell I had a sickening feeling that we’d made a mistake and that it wasn’t going to be worth the change.

Over a year later, I don’t one bit miss how Scriv 2 worked.

Hopefully you can get over that hump as well. Pep talk aside, here’s how I’d approach what you want done:

1. First things first, you know how Scriv 2 worked with levels, so you should have no problems getting Section Types all automatically wired up in your project since that is level based as well. Go to Project ▸ Project Settings... and click on Section Types if necessary.

2. You can probably leave the stuff in the first tab alone, but I’d make things intuitive for yourself: double-click on the “Sub-Heading” to rename it and call it “Heading with Text”.

3. Click on the second tab and set things up like so:

   

   Let’s go over that a bit. We’ve got our “Heading” type, which we’ll use for the “CHAPTER ONE” stuff on all folders. We’re ignoring file groups since you don’t use them. Files though, we’re having level 1 files set to a “Heading with Text” document type, and then all files lower than level 2 will just be regular old section text.

   Why root? Because it’s possible for stuff to be included in the compile group from outside of the Draft folder—and those things might need section types too. So with the exception of that one difference this is all quite like the Formatting compile pane—we’re just not formatting yet. We’re saying: these parts of the outline are these things, and that’s all we’re saying.

4. And that’s all we need to say at this level. I’d click on the Draft folder with your example project there and if the Section Types column isn’t visible, add it. How does that look? You might wonder why not just use levels in the compiler still—why the added layer? Well, the nice thing is that you can go into your outliner here and set one of those text files to “Heading with Text” if you need to. You couldn’t do that with the Formatting Pane.

5. If it’s all good, then open compiler and select a format. Maybe “Modern” is fine to start with—it has the layouts you’re looking for and if you don’t like the font, that’s what the font selector at the top of the middle column is for. Click that Assign Section Layouts... button at the bottom of the “Section Layouts” column in compile overview.

6. All right, as you want:

   • “Heading” has an obvious choice, there is a “Chapter Heading” layout that generates a page break and prints a numbered chapter title with no folder name.
   • “Heading with Text” looks like “Title Section” might be a good spot to start with.
   • Finally “Section” can be mapped to simple “Section Text”.

   What we’re doing here is a bit like what we did in the Formatting pane before, with all of the Title checkboxes and the prefix and suffix fields etc. It’s instead a visual and read-only presentation we can choose from.

   Click OK on that, and now you should have a pretty good preview of the document formatting in that middle column. Try clicking on the preview tiles in that middle pane—see how they light up the sections they’ll be formatting in the Contents list to the right?

Surely you’ll want to customise these eventually: just right-click on “Modern”, Duplicate & Edit, and check out the “Section Layouts” pane. This will be a lot like Formatting in Scrivener 2, only no levels—just Layouts, which are what we use to format Types. This system allows for non-linear mapping, hierarchy busting, custom structures within sections of the book (for example an Appendix type folder that generates a different kind of “chapter” within it), custom front/back matter handling, etc. Or it can be as “basic” as the Scriv 2 strict outline level based system too.

Hopefully the rest of the format designer is pretty familiar as well. Separators have been beefed up. Styles are new, and if you want to get into stylesheets that’s a good thing to learn about—see how this format overrides common styles? You can erase all of those to make them act as-is though.

Let me know if you have any questions or need further elaboration!

[TactualRain]

@AmberV

Let me know if you have any questions or need further elaboration!

…digesting…

Thanks for the great response, I will almost certainly come back once my brain is back in my skull.

[TactualRain]

@AmberV

for a spell I had a sickening feeling that we’d made a mistake and that it wasn’t going to be worth the change.

This is roughly where I am now. I’ve been reading the manual, the tutorial, playing around, and I’ve lost an entire day’s productivity trying to get this to work “right.” I am sort of struck dumb that it is so complicated. I get that it is powerful, but at the end of a long day (seriously! Eight hours!) staring at this, I am thinking it is perhaps too powerful. In contrast, it took me about an hour to get Scriv 2 to do what I wanted; this is a quantum shift in complexity My background is information technology, I kind of get computers, but this is some next level stuff. I do not understand how ordinary mortals would get this to work, unless they gave in and just used the defaults.

@AmberV

When I initially sat down with the first working build of the new system it took me a while to “get it” as well—and I even helped put the idea of it together on paper!

This was a great idea I have a dry-erase board in my office and I sat down and nutted through it with your help. I’m at the point where I might need a little more help. Here’s the problem.

When I compile the document, the back matter (which is just in the project file because previously we didn’t have back matter) is not formatted correctly. My back matter has:
Glossary
Review request
About me / buy my other stuffs
Acknowledgements
Excerpt of the next book int he series.

NOTE that I have tried to use Back Matter, and that just fails to populate the ToC entirely. No glossary, nothing.

I’m trying to include an excerpt of the next book there. I get two basic outputs:

1. The back matter has the correct titles (“One Good Lead” is there) but totally fails with custom separators. It just uses a blank line regardless of what is set, UNLESS
2. The back matter titles disappear completely from the Table of Contents, ending with just the Glossary, and all other parts being welded to the glossary with the custom separator.

This is regardless of which format I try (paperback, kindle, whatever), they all behave roughly the same way. Get the ToC right, and/or page breaks, OR it fails spectacularly but has custom separators.

Worth noting that throughout the rest of the project custom separators work fine in either scenario. That is, it is only when it processes the “Glossary” section it appears to stumble. I don’t know why but possibly to do with how things are configured. Here are some screenshots.

The back matter collection:

The section types I’m using. Note that it doesn’t fix the problem if All File Groups (which the excerpt’s chapter is) is set to Section. If I break out the chapter at the end into Level 1 files we get a different problem.

Here’s what the compile pane things of this (ignore the custom CS format, it doesn’t matter if we choose this, or my Kindle one, or the default E-Book one).

[TactualRain]

Ok, with my setup I’m encountering a limitation of either the custom separators or my understanding:

This is a snippet from Kindle where there should be a custom separator. I can get the entire rest of the document to work perfectly - custom separators, back matter in the ToC, Chapters numbered correctly, the whole thing.

Except! If a couple specific conditions are met:
The document is a File Group (Heading with Text) with child Sections or
The document is set as a Heading with Text with subsequent Sections all as top level documents

…custom separators are ignored. After a lot of time parsing the manual, this appears to be by design; custom separators are only honored if the documents are the same type.

Here’s an example from back matter (but it can be inside the main project too, it’s not related to back matter). This is a file group (“CHAPTER ONE” followed by 2, then 3):

What is maddening about this is that you get a separator there, JUST NOT THE CUSTOM ONE FFS. Is there a way to beat it into using the separator I want? Possibly by forcing a custom section break, rather than the default blank line? I’m going blind after a day of this and can’t see the options for the trees

[kewms]

I’m just going to sit back and match the Maestro at work.

Except to suggest, Ioa, that maybe this thread might be usefully turned into a blog post? Sort of a worked example of both how to think about compiling in Scrivener 3 and how to set up a specific reasonably complex situation?

Katherine

[TactualRain]

@kewms

I’m just going to sit back and match the Maestro at work.

LOL

@kewms

Except to suggest, Ioa, that maybe this thread might be usefully turned into a blog post? Sort of a worked example of both how to think about compiling in Scrivener 3 and how to set up a specific reasonably complex situation?

FWIW I was planning to do a quick YouTube on this once I’d mastered it. At this point I’m not sure I’m going to master it, so if there’s a blog post in the offing that would be ideal

[AmberV]

NOTE that I have tried to use Back Matter, and that just fails to populate the ToC entirely. No glossary, nothing.

Hmm, yes that’s potentially a bit of an oversight, seeing as how what typically goes into back matter is typically included in the ToC.

So from my reading it sounds like you’ve hammered out most of it by this point and are down to the separators issue. Let me know if I missed something.

I think maybe the sticking point is located in one of the few things you haven’t taken a screenshot of, so I can’t say for sure—but given your layout, are you paying attention to the Section Type assignments inside the back matter folder? Those are going to use the same rules as the draft—and they will be counting from the root as well. The reason why I suspect that might be a problem is that you have two levels of depth before getting to content, meaning that your “Glossary” section is acting like a “scene”, with the “Section” type assigned, not “Heading with Text”.

I’ve attached an example based on what I think your settings are like—notably haven’t touched the compile format itself. I’m just using the stock format. The only thing I changed was in the project:

1. I clicked on Back Matter in the binder and switched to Outliner.
2. On the “Something” folder, I clicked in the Section Type column and set the default subdocument type to “Heading with Text”.
3. Then, I set the Chapter One file group’s default subdocument type to “Section”, so that those scenes didn’t get printed as formal sections.

There are other approaches I could have used, like manually setting Section Types on each item—but given the procedural nature of the problem and the content being used, that made for an efficient solution.

17327690-compile_separators.zip (93.5 KB)

[TactualRain]

@AmberV

So from my reading it sounds like you’ve hammered out most of it by this point and are down to the separators issue.

Correct! All down to you really, I was just following the sheet music. So, thanks

@AmberV

but given your layout, are you paying attention to the Section Type assignments inside the back matter folder?

Aye. I initially sodded that up, but then went and tweaked them. That wrinkle has been ironed out.

From your screenshot:

The problem appears with the separator between “Chapter One” and “a.” The separators between “a” and “b” work fine, but when trying to implement a separator between Heading with Text and Section, only the default separator (blank line) appears.

Here’s what the back matter is configured as, pretty much as your example:

Hopefully you can see I’ve configured all the documents as Heading with Text, and the 2 & 3 as Sections subordinate to the “CHAPTER ONE.”

The ToC on Kindle et al compiles correctly:

Inside the document, this is the separator between “CHAPTER ONE” and “1.” The text “Well let’s go get that information” is at the bottom of “CHAPTER ONE” and “Which one of you…” is at the top of “1.” That is, there is no visible break, nor a custom section break:

(Note that the empty line is missing in this example, one of the 7,287,223 configuration options available has removed this, which was me trying to work out the section break systems in the various Section Layout type of the E-book format. No, not sure which one, but it doesn’t matter - this is illustrative enough ).

But the break between “1” and “2” uses a custom break just fine. I’ll need to show this in the next post because the forum won’t let me add more than 3 screenshots.

[TactualRain]

@TactualRain

But the break between “1” and “2” uses a custom break just fine. I’ll need to show this in the next post because the forum won’t let me add more than 3 screenshots.

This is what it looks like:

So that custom separator is working fine. According to the manual, this is by design; when using the “separator between sections,” the custom separator is only use in cases where both section types are the same. In this example, “Heading with Text” and “Section” are different, meaning the custom separator is ignored. We get whatever the default separator is.

My hunch is that there’s no fixing this unless there is a way of redefining what the standard Section Break value is (looks to be two carriage returns at the moment?). Is there a way to redefine the standard Section Break value?

[brookter]

I may be not quite understanding this, but are you basically saying that you want:

Chapter One

---

<text of 1>

---

<text of 2>

In other words, you just want the same *** between Heading with Text and Section as you get between Section and Section?

Have you tried (in Section) unticking the Use Default Separators option, then add the custom bullet to Separator before Sections? (ie as well has having it in the Section - Section separator.)

I can’t try it out at the moment, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work (if I’ve got it right what you want, of course…)

[TactualRain]

@brookter

Have you tried (in Section) unticking the Use Default Separators option, then add the custom bullet to Separator before Sections? (ie as well has having it in the Section - Section separator.)

Yep, I’ve tried this. The problem then becomes each Section having the custom separator, even after e.g. a chapter heading. So your text becomes:

CHAPTER ONE

---

Section text

It’s almost right; if there was a way to suppress the section format post a heading, for example, that would probably fix it.

[AmberV]

Okay, I understand better now I think. I’ve attached an updated example that solves that part of the problem. In this one, I have modified the format’s separator settings for two types:

• Section Text: I’ve modified Separator before sections to Custom and then copied and pasted the custom separator into that field. So Section Text now inserts a glyph between adjacent Section Text items, and it also inserts the glyph before any cluster of such items.
• Chapter Heading: I’ve enabled Override separator after and set it to single return. The above change introduced one problem: sometimes the glyph would be inserted between the chapter title and the first scene. By setting chapter titles to overrule any separators that following sections by inserting between them to a single line, we nullify that outcome.

So that custom separator is working fine. According to the manual, this is by design; when using the “separator between sections,” the custom separator is only use in cases where both section types are the same. In this example, “Heading with Text” and “Section” are different, meaning the custom separator is ignored. We get whatever the default separator is.

I don’t think the interaction would work this way, but maybe double check the folder/file separator defaults. That’s the closest thing to any kind of underlying default.
17327858-moar_separators.zip (97.9 KB)

[TactualRain]

@AmberV

I have modified the format’s separator settings for two types:

V I C T O R Y

TYVM for this. It’s working right. I had to jiggle some of the separator settings to make it work, but I’ve got it sorted now. Thanks again, lifesaver