Click into the “Section Title” text in the preview and choose “Bordered Title” - what do you mean by “in the preview”? I’ve stopped here because I don’t know what “the preview” means, or what the “Section Title text” means in the context, so I’m stuck - have fished around but can’t find how to do this.
Can anyone help with this?
Going through this again from the start with a new document.
The problem with changing the CSS class name is that when you get to that particular dialogue box, the choice has reverted back to ePub 2. If you click the drop-down menu on the top left, you can check the box for ePub 3 and the CSS choice will appear.
Clicking into the “Section Title” text in the preview - this seems to mean (as far as I can work out) that you go out of the Settings tab and into the Formatting tab, you can click into greeked text there. Unfortunately, the next point "choose “Bordered Title” is not possible here, as the options don’t include such a choice:
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the instruction? Or perhaps my copy of Scrivener is corrupt?
Here’s what I’m finding on the most recent instructions I’ve got to (I have renumbered them from 1 to 44 rather than a series of 1, 2, 3 repeating). My comments in bold:
- Under “Section Layouts”, you’ll see a whole slew of possible layouts. These are different options that users can choose for their ebook, formatting, but you don’t need them all. Delete all of them except for “Table of Contents (Bordered)” and “New Section”. There appears to be no “Table of Contents (Bordered)”.
- Rename “New Section” to “Song Lyrics”.
- Under the “Settings” tab for “Song Lyrics”, change “CSS class name” to “song-lyrics” (optional). To do this, it’s necessary to change the choices in the drop-down menu on top left of the box that starts “Section Layouts” so it includes ePub 3, and then choose ePub 3; CSS will appear, as will the “CSS class name” box.
- Tick “Title” for “Song Lyrics”. The title will be represented as “Section Title” at the top of the text preview below. This seems to be when you go out of the “Settings” tab and into the “Formatting” tab.
- Click into the “Section Title” text in the preview and choose “Bordered Title”. If this is done through the Formatting tab in this dialogue, there is no such choice.[/b]
- Click on “Title Options” and, in “Title Suffix”, make is that there is a newline (return character) followed by " by <$custom:Singer>" (replace “Singer” with “Songwriter” or whatever you used for the custom metadata title earlier).
- Switch to the “Formatting” tab and click into where it says “by singer”. Change the style (where it says “No Style” above) to “Subtitle”. This doesn’t appear to exist as a choice.
==
Another problem is that I can’t see any way to go back into the settings above once you’ve gone out of them; the only option is to make yet another duplicate set of settings… (Oh, wait, I’m wrong in that, you can right-click on the name and choose “Edit Format”.)
Going down through the instructions to the end:
- Tick “Title” for “Song Lyrics”. The title will be represented as “Section Title” at the top of the text preview below. This seems to be when you go out of the “Settings” tab and into the “Formatting” tab.
- Click into the “Section Title” text in the preview and choose “Bordered Title”. If this is done through the Formatting tab in this dialogue, there is no such choice. Chose “Heading 1” instead.
- Click on “Title Options” and, in “Title Suffix”, make is that there is a newline (return character) followed by " by <$custom:Singer>" (replace “Singer” with “Songwriter” or whatever you used for the custom metadata title earlier).
- Switch to the “Formatting” tab and click into where it says “by singer”. Change the style (where it says “No Style” above) to “Subtitle”. This doesn’t appear to exist as a choice. Chose “by singer” instead
- Select “Table of Contents (Bordered)”, switch to “Title Options”, and change “Title Case” to “Normal”. There’s no “Table of Contents (Bordered); I had chosen “Table of Contents” and the “Title Case” on this was already set to “Normal”.
- Click “Save”.
- Click Compile.
- Take a look at the ebook. Now it looks much nicer! Not particularly; there seems to be little formatting. The contents list is empty, so at this point I’ll generate a contents list by the old method of Copy Special/Copy as ToC. Two things to note, though: The contents list doesn’t look that great because you copied it from auto-titled documents. Also, because the text is set up for prose, the first line of each section is not as indented as the rest. Let’s fix that:
- In Compile, Ctrl-click on the “Songs Ebook” format and choose “Edit Format…”
- Choose “CSS” on the left, and then, under “Base text formatting”, click in the preview text and then drag the first line indent indicate to the left so that all of the text is flush-left with no indents.
- Click “Save” and then hold down the Option key so that the “Compile” button changes to “Save” and press that too to return to your project.
- In the “Contents” document, edit each line so that it reads more nicely. For instance, change “The thrill is gone (by BB King” to “The Thrill is Gone (BB King)”. (NOTE: You can just delete the contents, type out the titles as you want them, and then select each title and drag the document that it should link to onto the selected text. (What? Drag where? What? Oh, right, select the song title you’ve typed and drag the equivalent document title from the Binder onto that song title in the Contents list) This turns the selected text into a link to the relevant document).
- I’d also recommend going through the songs and making sure that there are no extra spaces around. For instance, in “The Thrill is Gone” there are two returns after the first verse instead of one as there is elsewhere.
- Next, let’s add that “Return to Contents” link you wanted to the bottom of each song. For this, under each song, in the text, go to Edit > Emoji & Symbols and, from “Arrows”, inset into the text a return arrow, such as “Leftwards arrow with hook” (you could equal add “Return to Contents” as text, but I think an arrow looks nicer).
- Now, select the arrow in the text and go to Edit > Add Link… No such item in Edit menu; tried Edit/Edit Link but that doesn’t have “No prefix” Choose “No prefix” for the link and for the text of the link, type “contents.xhtml”. This will tell the arrow to link to the contents document. (For some reason, linking it to the contents document isn’t currently working - I need to look into that. But typing the HTML name directly Instead, I checked Convert Document Links to HTML Links in the Options tab of the Compile dialogue
- Copy and paste the arrow with the link at the bottom of each song.
- One final tweak I might make is to add a hanging indent to the table of contents, given that the titles are quite long and spill across two lines. To do this:
- Edit the “Songs Ebook” Format in Compile again. Right-click on ‘Ebook’ on the left-hand side, and choose ‘Duplicate and edit format’. Should this be just Edit Format?
==
And onward to the end.
The problem seems to be that several of the menus Keith refers to don’t exist in my Scrivener. There’s no Table of Contents (Bordered); the dialogue in the menu that should have CSS in it automatically sets itself to ePub 2; the Formatting tab’s menu for changing the Section Title formatting doesn’t have options like Bordered Title and Subtitle; in the main Scrivener menu there’s no Edit/Add Link.
What’s causing these problems?
Edit: trying another project - what is this? Fifth? Seventh? Eighth - trying it as eBook 2 in case the menu choices would be different. This time, when I go to set up the Custom Metadata in the Inspector, there’s no Contents item, but there is a “Congents”. There’s also “Congents” in the Compile menu; I didn’t type it as a name or anything. And there’s no “Table of Contents (Bordered)” here either. Giving up on this until I can get real help. Screen shots:
Note that the instructions were based on starting with the project you sent me, which was set up with no titles in the binder and to Compile to ePub 3.
The choice never reverts from ePub 3 to ePub 2 unless you manually change it.
You need to start from ePub 3. If you duplicate the “Ebook” format when “ePub 2” is selected in Compile, then you will be working with a Compile format that was set up for ePub 2, not ePub 3. You need to have ePub 3 selected in Compile before you duplicate and edit the format. If you try to follow my instructions starting from the ePub 2 version of the “Ebook” format, you will not get the results you want.
If you started from the “Ebook” format under ePub 3 or KF8 there will be. (Not if you started from ePub 2, though, but your original project was set up for ePub 3, so that’s what the instructions are based on.
This wouldn’t be necessary if you started from ePub 3 in the first place, which was how the project you sent me was set up.
Correct.
Again, if you had started from the ePub 3 version of the “Ebook” format, there would have been. This seems to be the source of almost all of your problems.
The menu item is sometimes called “Edit Link” and sometimes “Add Link” - a vagary of macOS. There definitely is a “No prefix” option there unless you are editing an already-existing link to a document, which shouldn’t be the case if you have followed the instructions.
If you had started from the project you sent me - the project my instructions were based on - or if you had started from ePub 3 the same as your original project was using, then you would not have run into these issues, as the instructions are all for ePub 3. 
Keith, I’ve tried multiple projects at this stage. The first started with ePub 2 as per your original instructions. Several more started with ePub 3. Then I thought “I must be wrong, must have to start with ePub 2 after all” and tried that again.
I can go through it frame by frame taking screen shots, but would prefer to do that by email rather than cluttering up this thread, if you’d like to email me - otherwise I’ll do it here, starting again this evening.
By the way, I hadn’t seen your reply - was looking at the post count and the name on the last post here rather than going into the thread, and neither had changed.
My original instructions were based on ePub 3, because that is what the project you sent me was set to use. All you need to do is start with the original project you sent me and follow the instructions I posted at first. I literally documented everything I did to get the project you sent me into the state of the project I sent.
Hmm, tried it now and weirdly all the choices that were missing or wrong have righted themselves. It’s not because I restarted the computer - I did try restarting before; perhaps it’s that it was off overnight.
The contents.xtml biz didn’t work - I tried it and got an error, thought it might be because I’d used a lowercase “c” and tried it with uppercase, still no dice; tried it with quote marks and it flounced away indignantly saying this was improper. This is what I get when I try to click the link to go through to the Contents:
or
The only other problem is that I had put titles (“Song” and “Song Eile”) in the Binder for the song files; they translated when compiled into “Song” plus the “Singer” item:
Should I have made the “singer” entry in each one “by Anthropomorphic Teapot” and “by Religious Bigot” rather than having no “by”?
I have all the screen shots as it went along, should you want them.
Really weird that Scrivener went rogue like that, and then re-educated itself after a night’s sleep - though I think it had had nights’ sleeps during this as well…
Can’t now get the return-to-contents arrow to work in the compiled book. It occurred to me to delete the “Add link” link, but when I tried Edit Link, this is what I got:
Right, I’m happy enough now that I… kind of… know what’s going on. But the Add Link/Edit Link menu item is rather strange. Why does the text in the Add Link/No Prefix menu item change from contents.xhtml to scrivlnk://2F31680F-F9A3-460B-A168-DE24DAE13B40 - which for a moment I thought was my licence number, but no, it doesn’t seem to be?
One final, final question: I’ve used Keith’s original template to make a songlist, but the titles are showing as (eg for a song called All Of Me):
All Of Me by
I thought this came from the Custom Metadata relating to Singer, but no, I nuked that for this document, but that pesky little ‘by’ refuses to leave. Where is it hiding, and how do I get rid of it? (My friend doesn’t need the singer names in this one.)
Title suffix?
Title suffix sounds likely, thanks. Where do I find it?
In the manual, starting on page 612.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at the manual. Stupidly, I was relying on the Interactive Tutorial and the Scrivener 3 Update.
Darn, as far as I can see, the manual is about Scrivener 2.
Edit, oh, wait, it isn’t, but you have to import something called the Extras Pack to see the menus shown. Dear God.
Edit again: I imported the Extras Pack and obediently clicked on “6-Title Options Examples.scrformat”. It opened in BBEdit and was a big chunk of CSS, apparently. There don’t seem to be any instructions on how to mind-meld this with Scrivener.
I’ve tried dragging it onto Scrivener in the Applications folder: nope.
I’ve tried using Scrivener’s Import menu option with no project open; greyed-out: nope.
I’ve tried opening a useless project and importing it: there was a kind of flash, but I can’t see how to invoke the menu shown: nope.
This is what the manual says:
I’ve got rid of the ‘by’ by unchecking (in the Compile section, having ctrl-clicked the name of the ebook custom format (‘Songs Ebook’) and chosen ‘Edit Format’.
Document Title Links/Update titles in document with prefix and suffix settings
however, I can’t find where that ‘by’ is stored within the project, in any of the settings.
