I have written 8 rather large books in Scrivener in recent times, and I have to say it is quite the most amazing application. I am always discovering more capabilities, and it is rock solid. It has become totally indispensible.
Here are my issues:
Right now I copy and paste the finished text into Pages for final formatting, compiling contents etc. before exporting the book as a pdf ready for the printers. I would much prefer to compile everything right in Scrivener and bypass the whole pages bit, but there are a couple of things I just cannot figure out.
When I create a table of contents within Scrivener, everything is underlined, which looks really crude. How can I format the table of contents in a style that complements the rest of the document?
One of the reasons for using pages is that I have set up a template with headers and footers that include a logo on the LH page, followed by a right alined project title then a carriage return and a full width line underneath and another couple of carriage returns to separate the document text from the header area.
For the footer I have a couple of carriage returns, then a full width line again, then a carriage return then the page number centred below that.
I hope you can picture what I’m saying.
I would like to be able to replicate this in Scrivener, but just cannot figure out how to add images to the header or carriage returns to either the header or the footer.
Is it possible to do what I’m asking? If so, how can I do it?
When you paste in a ToC that you created, that’s just editable text like anything else. You can get in there and reformat it however you please. To get rid of underlines completely, you can just select the whole ToC and press Cmd-U twice.
You’re going to hit a snag with the header stuff though. You can certainly insert carriage returns with Opt-Return, but these are going to build upward from the header baseline, rather than pushing into the document space from above/below, as it sounds like you are doing—some of that could just be accomplished with adjusting your margins, unless I misunderstand. Anyway, you won’t be able to insert images or rules in the header or footer, so all of that is kind of moot to begin with.
You can still compile though! No need to copy and paste the entire Draft folder over to Pages. You’ll just need to touch up some of the stuff after you do so.
I have managed to insert a rule in the footer (or rather I have created a line of dashes ———————— which has the same effect) followed by the opt-return you suggested and the page number centred underneath. That works fine.
I can’t get a similar line to show up in he header area though. Any idea why?
With regard to the table of contents, I am not quite getting the result I want yet but will experiment further.
For the underlining in the ToC, are you saying this shows up after you’ve compiled? The titles and <$p> tag will be underlined in the document in Scrivener since they’re links (unless you’ve turned off link underlining in preferences), but once you’ve compiled to .rtf or .pdf or what have you, the underlining shouldn’t normally show up in the compiled document.
I’m not sure why a sequence of dashes isn’t showing up for you in the header. There seems to me no difference between the footer and header field and result when I do a test compile. What other components do you have in there? I tried with “<$projectittle>------”.