Hello, this is my first post here. I absolutely love Scrivener, I have been using it for a research report, and its preserve formatting option is what first drew me to it, because formatting for some reason, has been the most difficult thing for me. My other word processors won’t do it correctly, and I have been really impressed by Scrivener since it allows me to keep my formatting as it shows.
Essentially, my only problem is page numbers. How can I automatically add them to the end of each page. This is pretty urgent, so if anyone has an answer, that would be great. Sorry if this is an obvious answer, I spent a good deal of time searching around the documentation, to no avail… Thanks in advance!
Scrivener is not a word-processor as such and doesn’t internally work in terms of pages. However you can get page numbers on output, but there’s not a huge amount of control over them. When you want to print, or export the document, the way to do it is through the “Compile Draft” selection which you find at the bottom of the “File” menu. On the second tab, “Text Options” at the bottom right of that pane, you will find options for header or footer including how to enter a page number and alignment. You can only have a header or a footer, though, not both … if I understand it rightly. I have never used it as I think all layout matters are best done in a word-processor or page make-up program like InDesign.
What word-processor are you using? I use Nisus Writer Pro, which does the job of page numbering excellently, as I’m sure Mellel does too. On the other hand I’ve just found that Pages 3 doesn’t handle the numbering of facing pages properly … at least I haven’t managed to get it to do so. Word, I don’t mention, as it has been anathema to me since version 5.1.
Thanks for the help… I use NeoOffice and Google Docs, both which seemed to have failed me. I am giving Nisus Writer Pro a shot right now, and so far it looks very promising! Thanks once again!
Edit: I checked out Nisus Writer Pro… it looks great, but it won’t preserve the formatting like I need to. If you have any ideas, could you please help me. The problem is that I am required to double tab all my quotes… and when I print my paper out, it doesn’t format correctly and shows large tab spaces in the middle of the pages, when it should be at the side. It obviously isn’t reading the page width correctly… please help me if you have any ideas!
What do you mean “double-tab your quotes”? If you mean inset them by the amount of two tab stops, in Nisus, simply set up a “quote” style and assign each quotation to that. Open the drawer; choose the styles tab, the one with the pencil icon; set up a paragraph the way you want it; highlight that paragraph and from the styles palette and choose “¶ Based on Selection” … The styles view will open with it named “Paragraph Style” which will be highlit; just type a new name and press ‘enter’. Go back to page view and apply that style to any quote you have.
I see from your first post that you are using “preserve styles”. When you write a quote in Scrivener, are you inserting two tabs at the point where the text wraps to a new line? If so, that’s the root of your problem, I guess. Not being a word-processor, Scrivener doesn’t really know about pages, so the print margins will be different from the margins on screen; those tabs are just tabs in the middle of a long block of text that is wrapped at the time of display/print according to the margins set at that time.
I don’t attempt any formatting in Scrivener. I mark off quote paragraphs with
[quote]
if the text is really complex, then export to RTF. I open the RTF in Nisus, set the styles there and then print that or print to PDF for sending to others as appropriate.
If you want to do the styles in Scrivener, you need to show the ruler (Cmd-R), set up the margins, indents and tabs as you want, together with font information, then save that as a named style to apply. But the styles in NWP are much more powerful, enabling you to make changes to some aspect on the style sheet and all the instances of that style will be updated. That doesn’t happen with the styles in the Apple Text System as used by Scrivener and many other applications.
Phew, thanks for that long explanation Mark, you’ve been a great help. I will give that a try in Nisus right now, as I just tested out the page numbering in Scrivener, and although it showed up in the PDF file, it did not show on the paper when I printed it, even from the PDF. Unfortunately I am not quite the word processing, writing wizard as you are, since I am only in 9th grade… I must thank you immensely, it is really great to get an intelligible, helpful response on the Internet.
Adieu, and have a good day! (Or night, whatever the time is in China )
Edit: Oh yea and you guessed right with the quote tabbing. Thanks for the tips about styles!
Thanks. Hope you get it all sorted out. Don’t be afraid to ask questions on this forum; people here are really helpful. Keith (KB, the creator of Scrivener) is very responsive too, but Literature and Latte and Scrivener are a one man operation and that man also has a day job as a teacher, so any of us users who can do so chip in and help whenever possible.
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