Hi all, I’m going to write a book about my grandparents. It will have text, pictures, copies of documents, and other inserts – landscape format as well as portrait. The pictures should have captions. Is Scrivener a good tool for this? If not, is there other software than can do this? Thank you.
I would say, very briefly, that Scrivener has good support for kickstarting the project. You can manage images in a variety of methods, including linking to them on the disk to save project space and keep them easily editable (which is how most professional systems will work). They can be managed on a “light table” (we call it a Corkboard, because it also manages text and other file types, but it’s the same idea), and placed into the text so that you know where you want them to be.
As for all of that, there is an entire section in the user manual PDF on this topic, §15.6, Working with Images, and it should come as no surprise that the forum has many years of discussions on practical workflows and such. The search tool looks like a magnifying glass in the top right of the website.
To caution on one matter though, a lot of your phrasing seems to indicate you are approaching Scrivener as a desktop publishing tool, which it is far away from. Scrivener will be where you write the words, where you indicate where the images should be, what they should have for a caption, etc. Actually making a book though requires a different kind of software, which you’ll be migrating to at some point once the primary drafting work is done. That is also something you’ll find many existing discussions on around here, including recommendations for tools, or how to find freelance designers if all of this is outside of your area of experience.
That should get you started anyway. You don’t need anything fancy to start putting words down, and dropping in a graphic into the text editor here or there.
1 Like
Hi. Thank you for your quick reply. So Scrivener doesn’t format the page and then make it readily exportable to a PDF, for example?
Only in a very basic sense, and then one I would only consider acceptable for proofing and advance reader copies.
Anything can make a PDF, that’s not really a challenge (especially on a Mac, where PDF is essentially how your display works, so making a PDF is more akin to a screenshot that any program can “snap”). It is the quality of the type, and the capabilities of the layout engine for placing images, and so forth, that matter.
1 Like