I’m working on an anthology consisting of short stories by multiple authors. Within each story, I want that story’s author to appear in the header on the left page, and the title of the story to appear in the header on the right page. I can use the <$sectiontitle> tag for the title, but how do I put the author’s name in the header? I’ve defined custom metadata for the story’s author but custom metadata tags are not supported in the headers or footers. Has anyone else faced this issue?
I’m using Scrivener 3 on MacOS.
Thanks!
I’ll be interested to hear if someone has an answer to this one myself.
OK, this is a bit fiddly, and it doesn’t quite address the full problem (author on left, name on right), but at least it gets the changing name and author into the heading. There may be knock on effects which I haven’t thought of (eg. how it would affect a ToC) so it may not fit your needs — and of course someone will come along in a minute and give a very simple solution I hadn’t thought of…
But still, here we go:
Obviously, ignore the formatting etc, but basically, it’s set up like this:
In the binder
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Name the Chapter folder with both the name and title of the story (‘Fred Bloggs: My Story’), and give it the custom metadata StoryAuthor=“Fred Bloggs”. The text is empty.
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Create a new section type (‘False Chapter’) and allocate it to the first scene in every chapter only. Then rename these first scenes to the Story Name. Leave all the other scenes as they were.
Compile. (These are based on PDF - Modern)
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Allocate the Layouts as follows: Chapter Folder = ‘Heading’, False Chapter= ‘Titled Section’, and Scene as whatever it was before.
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Edit the format, and click on Section Layout: Heading. You want ALL the boxes to be unticked. Go down to title options, then add <$custom:StoryAuthor> to Title Prefix and remove everything else. Click on Formatting and you should just see StoryAuthor in the dummy text.
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Select Titled Section layout, and make sure Title and Text are both ticked. I didn’t make any other changes.
4 Go to Separators and click on Titled Section: make sure ‘default separators’ is unticked, and change Separator before sections to Empty line or Single Return.
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Go to Page Settings and add <$sectiontitle> to the header.
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Save and compile.
Obviously, some of the section layouts may have different names, but the basic principle is:
- Header = Author + Title from the name of the Chapter Folder in the binder.
- Chapter author from Chapter Folder custom metadata added to the prefix of a layout with Title and Text unticked
- Chapter title and text of first scene comes from the first scene (False Chapter) in a layout with Title and Text ticked and with a ‘before’ separator which isn’t page break.
- Rest of the scenes in the chapter as normal.
As I said, a bit fiddly, and there may be side effects, but perhaps you could play with it to get it as you want it.
(BTW, I think it’s a great example of how flexible Version 3 compile is compared to V2…)
HTH.
Thanks for the workaround! Correct, it’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it may work. I’ll have to clear it with the authors.
One option is to have the title of the anthology on the left and the story:author on the right. Anyway, this gives me another option to work with. Thanks!
Oh, and BTW, I agree—V3 compile is HUGELY better than V2 compile. Well done, L&L.
No problem — it was fun seeing if it would work… I’m finding that the flexibility of Section Type v Section Layout is really powerful in some unexpected (to me) ways, once I stop thinking in V2 terms.
… I think I could have gotten this to work in Scriv 2, but it would have involved some horrid restructuring of my folders/documents. Not a bad solution!
I haven’t had time to test this, but what if you created a custom metadata field “Author” and entered the author’s name to every folder/document belonging to that author’s piece? Is the custom metadata information available for use in the header?
If that doesn’t work, could you create a parent folder to every piece and name it for the author, and either use $parenttitle, or $levelNtitle (or whatever it is) in the header? I would try not including that parent folder in compile, so it doesn’t mess up the contents of your document–hopefully it would still grab that folder’s title.
This is from the placeholders document in help, so it doesn’t look like you can unfortunately- another section rules out document variables like parenttititle as well.
The folder trick does work, as in my post, but there doesn’t to be a way of splitting the data.