I’m editing an anthology, and have a section of prose and a section of poems. The compile to .mobi format is looking fine so far, but there are a couple of things to iron out, one of which is the way the lines of poetry indent on small screens.
Most of my text documents are formatted with small paragraph indents and 1st para indents removed. The poetry, as it occupies the same ‘level’ in the compiler as the prose, is formatted identically, but what I want to do is format the poems with hanging indents and flush left paragraph starts, so that as the user changes font size on their device, any line that has to spill over is clearly continued and not broken.
However, I cannot seem to change the ‘level’ of a document. I’ve tried adding folders and moving things into them, I’ve tried nesting text documents, I’ve tried to find some menu option to set it. Can’t find anything. And I can’t see this in the user guide either, though maybe I’ve missed it. Whenever I make these changes, each document retains its initial ‘level’ setting.
Any advice? How can I differentiate some files from others post hoc so they will format differently in the compiler?
All a level is is how deeply nested something is beneath Draft (or the current compile group). If you put a folder into Draft, it will be on level 1. If you put a file into a folder, it will be level 2. That is all there is to it, and thus any action that will move something from one location to another is capable of changing an item’s level.
Of course nesting poetry into a folder will do nothing about its formatting all by itself. I presume you have things set up for level 2 in the Formatting compile option pane—otherwise it will make no difference at all what level you put a file on, if the only rule in that pane is “Level 1+”.
You should take one of your poetry documents and select the lines of it and use the paragraph format tools to style the paragraphs of it to suit. (You may want to make your project window very narrow to force some poem lines to wrap around on screen, so you can see the line-wrap you are getting.) Once you have that settled and working like you like on compile, you can go back to a poem line in that document and save the styling of that paragraph as a saved preset. Click into one of your formatted paragraphs (lines) and choose Format > Formatting > New Preset From Selection.
Having done that, you could go select the poem lines in any other document and apply to them your saved preset (from the presets pop-up menu on the format toolbar --seen in the very upper left of the screenshot below).
That was my assumption, until I tried to arrange the binder to govern which documents/folders were at what level. The result was that it didn’t matter a jot where I put things, I could not change the level of any documents - they stayed all on the same level in the compiler, no matter where they were placed in the binder.
That was exactly what I was trying to do - arrange the material so that I could then use the compiler to format different levels in different ways. But Scrivener is just not letting me do that and I don’t know why.
Here’s a screenshot which hopefully illustrates the issue. I added a new folder and placed in it a new document; it comes up at the same level as the others, despite them all being at different nesting depths. I also added a Level 2 formatting line in the compiler, and suddenly all my text docs were now level 2 instead of level 1. I have no idea what’s going on.
It’s a little hard to tell from the screenshot, but I think all of these files are level 2 or greater. Level 2 is defined from the compile “root” (Draft by default), not how far away from the nearest folder a file is. A simple check would be to add a Level 3+ rule to the pane, and maybe even a 4+, I’m not quite sure, if you only want to isolate the very lowest level of the hierarchy for poetry, then you might need a few dummy levels in your settings as I see at least four levels of depth in the screenshot.
There is another approach that may work for you, depending upon how many poetry documents there are and whether fully opting out of the Formatting pane is desirable—but the “Compile As-Is” checkbox is great for stuff that otherwise doesn’t conform to a pattern, as established in Formatting.
Not quite sure what you mean - initially, I had only "level 1’ documents in the compiler. All my text docs were level 1. No amount of moving around in the binder, in however many nested folders, change that. The folders themselves are at different levels, but the text documents are not.
Fort the purpose of the above illustration, I added a Level 2 by clicking + in the compiler. Without doing anything else at all, all my text docs now appear as level 2, not level 1.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, so far attempting to add levels to the documents by clicking in the compiler or by shifting in the binder have absolutely no differentiating effect at all.
Unless you mean that I need to increase the number of visible levels in the compiler, so that the highlighted items in the binder are at least that level? Have I got this process back to front?
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. You have at least four levels of depth in the screenshot, so if it is your intention to only target the 4th level with special formatting, then you will need in the compile pane for text files, “Level 1”, “Level 2”, “Level 3” and “Level 4+”. The first sections can all be identical and just there to establish a fourth level—that’s what I meant by “dummy levels”. You aren’t actually using three levels of formatting to get to four, but you need the three entries to establish that formatting for poetry should only start at level four or greater, not two or greater, which is currently everything.
Right now you have a Level 2+ rule which, as I say, appears to be a valid way to address every single file in your screenshot. They are all nested beneath at least one folder, so none of them are level 1. Simply hit that + button again in the formatting pane and hopefully the situation should become incrementally more clear as you add levels.
Thanks AmberV, you were spot on – I created a new folder which I unticked from the “include in compile” list, and put all the poetry folders in there, to increase their depth by one level; then I added a level in the compiler, and formatted the hanging indents that way. It all works perfectly now.
