Hello friends, I hope someone can help me. I am in formatting hell.
I’m compiling my novel to .docx and opening it in Pages on my Mac. The formatting is inconsistent—paragraph indents are variable, it’s all a mess. Nothing I try fixes it. When I set the indents to 1/2 an inch in Pages, it doesn’t apply that uniformly. I set it up in Scrivener to have the first line of each new chapter flush left, and then 0.5” indents in subsequent paragraphs. But when I open it in Pages it’s not that way. Some are, some aren’t. Some are 0, some are 1”, it’s all over the map. Some chapters are flush left, some are indented. I tried to select the whole doc in Pages and fix it that way but it didn’t work. I can’t even fix them all manually. I googled, I tried AI, nothing anyone suggests seems to work. What the hell should I do?? Help! Thank you.
Welcome Doug!
Firstly, don’t panic! Getting worked up about things doesn’t help you solve them.
Where are you in the process? How much of your novel have you written? Are you facing any deadlines? Have you set any styles, in particular have you set a “Body” style? If so, that is part of your problem; all body text in Scrivener should be No Style, as that becomes Body style in DOCX, but being “No Style” it doesn’t bake in formatting that conflicts with what you expect.
So the first thing I would do is go to Scrivener > Settings > Editor > Formatting click in the dummy text and set the ruler first line indent to .5 inch and the font and size to what you are comfortable with while working (it does not have to be the font you want on compiling, but if you’re happy with Times New Roman, go for that). Click on Set Styles defaults….
Now in the binder, click on Draft/Manuscript (whatever it is named, and select all the chapters and scenes, i.e. everything which is part of Draft/Manuscript and then go to Documents > Convert > Text to Default Formatting…. Hopefully, that should turn everything into No Style, but check it all.
Then, with it all selected, go to Edit > Text Tidying > Strip Leading Tabs, as from what you said some paragraphs must have a leading tab.
In Scrivener, the only “paragraphs” that should be marked with a style are those that differ from the body/normal text, like block quotes or headings.
When you have done that, and all except any quotes or headins is in No Style, try compiling to “Manuscript (Times}” with DOCX as the target and let us know the outcome.
HTH
Mark
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Hey, Doug.
Is your Pages document a “Document” or a “Page Layout” file? Most likely, you’ll want it to be a Document.
Are you using paragraph headings in Pages? You can set the Body and many other things so they update throughout the document. I’d set indent formatting in Pages under the Body paragraph style.
Another option might be to export from Scrivener as an RTF file and open that file in Pages. I’ve had some minor formatting issues with documents built in Word and then opened in Pages, but they were minor.
I’ll be interested to hear if you find a solution.
Steve
Thanks Mark! The novel is 100% done, this was my 5th revision. And yes, I had done all that from the start. I still can’t figure out why the compiling wasn’t working as intended, but I ended up just fixing everything in the docx manually, which was painstaking and time-consuming, but at least got the job done. Thanks for your help!
Thanks Steve! The weird thing (among several weird things) was that the Body setting and other styles were not applied consistently. For example, I created a “first paragraph of each chapter” style but in the docx, it was not applied evenly. In any event, I still can’t figure out why the compiling wasn’t working as intended, but I ended up just fixing everything in the docx manually, which was painstaking and time-consuming, but at least got the job done. Thanks!
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I’m glad you got the document where you wanted it. Sounds like a lot of work.
My money is on the Word format causing an issue with Pages. I have one Pages document that was started in Word, then opened and saved in Pages. The heading page numbers cannot be edited in Pages, but they continue to display properly.
Once I resolve the comments, I’ll just rebuild the Pages document.
Steve
