My question is, is how to format lists in Scrivener and them have them look the same in a compiled ePub document?
Secondly, there seems no way to change the padding of tables, or the the size of the text they use - this makes it very difficult to compile a decent ePub document.
Does anyone have any answers to these pretty major problems, in my view?
Enabling invisible characters will help sort out issues like what you’re seeing in the bullet lists: Format/Options/Show Invisibles. It looks to me as though there may be unwanted whitespace characters in the text. I would make a new list from scratch in an empty file with invisibles enabled, and then visually compare the characters you see so that you can know what to delete or alter in order to make them well-formed. Another thing I’d do, especially if this text was pasted in from another word processor or the Web, is to select the bullet list and remove bullet formatting—then add it back.
There is no difference between formatting a line with a bullet and formatting a paragraph of text, according to Scrivener. Any of the standard tools should be working, so I’d need a little more information into what you’re trying to do, to answer that.
Now if you mean in the ePub—I doubt there is much you can do from Scrivener’s side of things. Bullets are an entirely different animal in HTML, tabs don’t even exist as a concept in output HTML and the bullet character itself isn’t something included in the text, like in RTF, but something drawn in front of the line by the HTML rendering kit. So you would need to more directly use native formatting tools to design how bullets look using CSS and then edit those styles into the ePub file after compilation. They should at least be consistent and thus easy to globally modify in this fashion.
Tables are poorly supported by e-book readers (both in technology and in concept—tables are much more at home in an environment where the size of thing they will exist within is known, and e-books by definition do not have a native size). I’d avoid them if at all possible—but if you must, then this is another thing better done in the final format itself rather than remotely with an RTF->HTML converter. Whatever the case it’s probably going to take a lot of experimentation to get the settings right, and I’d use as many ePub readers as possible in the testing. Good luck!
