I think it has something to do with the style or the paragraph or something, I’m not really sure I’m looking into it.
When I compile your Archive.zip that contains the Scrivener project titles “sample” I was able to compile without a space between the sections.
Here’s what I’m looking at. In the sample you provided there are only sections, but there are no sections underneath of those sections. I don’t want to say that there are no sub-sections underneath of those sections, because in the context of Scrivener sub-sections has kind of its own meaning. There are no sub-documents underneath the documents that are there.
I created some sub-documents to make sure we can get the same results when there are subdocuments, like so:
I added the subdocument “One point five” and another one called “Here is another document”. OK, so far so good, but when I initially compiled the just “One point five” there, it didn’t look right. My default font was different from yours. So, I selected some of your text and clicked “Format>Paragraph>Copy paragraph attribute” and then pasted those attributes onto the newly created subdocument. It didn’t bring over the font, so I did something else that I don’t remember, I’m still looking into it.
I think it has something to do with paragraph styles, but I’m not sure. I’m really not sure. I’m trying to compare what you uploaded to what I have.
I definitely recommend, by the way, testing settings with an editable format. If you are using formatting, then RTF, DOCX or ODT. In my sample I used TXT because it is extremely simple and impossible for there to be any mysterious factors (like paragraph padding).
PDF on the other hand is probably the most mysterious (from the standpoint of figuring why anything looks like anything), because it’s more like a picture of the document at that point. We can no longer see if what you’re looking at is actually an empty line, or no empty line at all but an instruction to add enough space between paragraphs so that it looks like an empty line.
As for my example, once edited to use “Single Return” separators, it is extremely simple. No styles, no custom formatting, no titles being inserted, no page breaks. I use this test format for a reason, because it is devoid of almost every assumption you can think of, and thus every change made to it is simple, positive rather than hunting from negatives.
I think I figured out what happened. In fact I’m sure I figured it out. I needed to go to the “Separators” section and change everything to “Single return”. I think there was an option set that was overriding the “Single return” separator that I had set. I didn’t realize it was overriding the “Single return” option and changing it down stream somehow.
I wasn’t careful to change all of the areas that needed to be changed, and I think the option was getting ignored because there were other options telling the compiler to ignore it.
Yup! That’s exactly what I was cautioning about earlier. If you just change the “Text Files” underlying default, but are using the “Text Section” Layout for all of your text, then no amount of changing things for the default will impact what you see.
So yes, there is a “down stream” as you put. The two settings at the top only change how things work if they don’t use Section Layouts, or if the section layout has that Use default separators checkbox ticked at the top, of course.
In this way you can have most of your layouts working the same way, and change how they work more simply, and only have those that are different add space, or hashes/asterisks, whatever you need.
As for the dividers in the text editor itself, again refer to my previous post where I explained that in the first few paragraphs.
Thanks AmberV for correcting my understanding of Separators. Single Line is clearly what I want rather than Custom. And you were so gentle in your correction!
-Big John
