How to survive nested list disfunctionality until Styles arrive?

Hi there,

This was ment to be a pre-sales posting until I just read the blog post announcing styles for editor and compilation in V.3 Mac and that Windows will have it, too (So I haven’t bought, yet you already sold … hope it won’t be very long though).

I am on day 12 of my trial period of Version 1.9.7.0 Windows, working my way into my liking of your product … and got severely stuck once I came across the issue of enumeration and text levels.

My main writing purpose is ‘structured text’ i.e. documentations, texts with a kind of legal structure etc. Therefore document internal levels and enumeration are features I extensively use. As compelling as Scrivener’s capabilites to collect, categorize and link resource materials are on the one hand: Working the draft with numbered nested lists became such a frustrating experience and got me close to throwing the towel.

Imagine a 10 page legal charter containing 15 articles (level 1) with an overall of 80 sections (level 2) and about 20 clauses (level 3). No major piece … and it seems possible to handle that in the editor when sticking to the predefined formats (indentation etc.). OK.

Yet I face two more problems when compiling the draft and I ask for your help here:

As described above, my draft contains 3 levels of enumerated text segments.
Level 1 (article) appears as regular text numbered by a placeholder tag ‘§<$n>’
Level 2 (section) appears as numbered list (list level 1)
Level 3 (clause) appears as numbered list (list level 2 = indented)

In compilation I use no titles but only the text portions and .odt (OpenOffice Writer) as target format.
2 Texts went into the compilation.
1st text: 1 article, 3 sections (level 1 list items)
2nd text: 1 article, 5 sections, 10 clauses (level 2 list items)

On the left: Scrivener and on the right: OpenOffice …

In the editor, all lists and levels are intact and editable, yet in the output there are missing parts and only one mis-numbered level remaining … it’s a mess and I just don’t know it how can be avoided. Any hints?

And furthermore: even if all levels would be reproduced correctly, the output draft is a flat leveled, entirely default-styled document. Is it realy the intended workflow to manualy assign formats to every new draft version? (In my sample case to about 130 mixed level list items).

I realy hope you can point me to the errors that I make to spare me some frustration until the next Windows update is released.

Thanks a lot.
Wolfgang
(Germany)

I am really new to this, and trying to get my head around this as well. I am fed up with writing legal documents in word and spending inordinate amounts of time fixing formatting and numbering…

Forgive me if this is a stupid suggestions, but are the <$hn>, <$ahn>, <$aon>, <$hn_0>, <$hn_levelN> placeholders not what you need? From the little research I have done I beleive these give nested numbering, like we both need, but i have not had a chance to experiment with it yet. I am planning to this week.

Chris