Pardon me if this is trivial but I haven’t found a clear explanation for what seems simple enough. I do find this software confusing in some ways.
I am writing a full length non-fiction manuscript (475 pages, 90 illustrations) for a major publisher who requires the deliverable in Microsoft Word,
I am trying to use Scrivener to do this because it has wonderful features. The publisher doesn’t care for Scrivener and only wants to see a perfect Word document.
One problem I am having is producing a Word document that has the Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. as Word “styles” and producing a Word table of contents.
It seems to me it might easily be done with > Compile For: Microsoft Word (.docx) > Project Formats > My Manuscript > Section Layouts > Chapter Heading
Yes, that will work (I do it all the time). However, you need to create styles in Scrivener, apply them consistently and then map them to Word styles when you compile. The most annoying thing about Scrivener is the use of “no style” as the default. Word does not map paragraphs without a named style onto the normal style, so I have found I had to do a lot of manual tidying up in Word after compiling. You can get round this by creating a style named “normal” in Scrivener and using it for every paragraph (that isn’t formatted with another named style). This needs some planning, but it does work.
I hope that Scrivener styles will get a bit of a make-over in a future update, but that clearly isn’t going to happen before version 3 for Windows finally ships, so for now, the kind of workaround I’ve suggested seems to be the best solution.
What I was wondering is if the section layouts could automatically apply the styles based on the “Structure-Based” Section Types so Microsoft Word (DOCX) would know what level (style) the sections were (Heading1, Heading2, etc.)?
One of the great benefits of Scrivener is the ability to move the outline around so freely. Manually changing the Scrivener styles to match the heading levels would make Scrivener more cumbersome than using Word alone, I think.
Yes. Or at least Mac Scrivener 3 can. I don’t know if the beta has that functionality yet. Assign the style in the formatting preview area of the Section Layout editor.
Yes, to confirm, this is all wired up correctly in the beta now. You should be able to assign “Heading #” styles to headings, and apply “Body” (or whatever you need) to body text.
As to whether that actually exports an outline correctly is another matter. In examining the RTF files at the code level, it does not appear as though the Windows version is inserting the necessary metadata to let word processors know that “Heading 1” is anything special, with regards to an outline (and upon that, whether you can automatically generate a ToC). So I’ll get that written up as a necessary adjustment.
