After compiling into mobi and epub files, the indentation of my Prologue is missing (everything left adjusted). The Prologue is a folder with nested text. The folders that follow with chapters are indented correctly. I’ve attached a screenshot of my Compile page. Any suggestions, please?
Just so I’ve understood correctly: the text you see inside the Prologue on the Kindle is indented differently from the text you see in the ordinary chapters. Is that right?
One of the flexibilities of Scrivener is that you can have different formatting for the text within Folders, Document Groups (that’s when a document itself has sub-documents) and Documents at various levels of the Binder hierarchy.
From your description, it looks that’s what’s happening here. If you go to the Formatting section in the left hand sidebar, you’ll see a stylised representation of your binder, split into Folders, Document Groups and Documents with one or more levels.
Select the top level Folder line: it should have at least the Title and Text boxes ticked. Then look at the text in the dummy text box below: what does the indenting look like there? If I’m right, it will look different to the dummy text you see when you look at the relevant level of Document (click on each document line till your Chapters are highlighted in yellow in the Binder to make sure you’ve got the right one). Note whether the ‘override’ box is ticked or not.
Go back to the Folder line and if the Chapter override box was unticked, then make sure the Folder override box is unticked too. Otherwise, turn tick the ‘Override…’ box is on, then click on the dummy text (not the dummy title) and format it the way you want using the format bar above it.
If that doesn’t work (or it’s not the problem you’re having), please post a screenshot of the Compile > All Options > Formatting panel and of the output you see for both sets of text.
HTH.
Brookter–Thanks for replying. I compiled both an epub and mobi file using my Mac and tested out both files using Apple’s iBook and Kindle’s readers on the Mac. The Prologue indentation is lost in both formats, yet the indentation for everything that follows (contained in similar folders) is fine.
What I ended up doing is saving the Prologue As is, and it seems to work fine. But if you or someone in Support understands what I’m doing wrong, I’d like to know. I suspect that Scrivener is treating the Prologue as Front Matter. If I add a file and place the Prologue text in it (rather than writing it directly on the Prologue folder as I have it now) it becomes Chapter 1.
Putting the text of the Prologue in its own document in the Prologue folder will cause it to adopt the same format as your ordinary chapters — that’s how it’s designed to work — so it will inherit the chapter numbering of course.
It’s not clear from your answer: did you follow the steps I suggested? Could we see a screenshot of your Compile > Formatting panel for both the Folders and the Documents line? Of course there could be problems other than that, but it’s the obvious first place to look.
Brookter–I was about to take a screenshot of the compile page you asked for when I noticed I had Override text and notes formatting checked. I don’t remember doing this. I’m not even sure what it does!. Anyway, I unchecked it and now I have my indentions returned to the Prologue. Thank you so much for your patience. Problem solved.
Glad it helped!
Briefly: if that box is unticked, then the compile takes the paragraph formatting from the Editor defaults (which you set in Preferences, of course). But if the box is ticked, then you can override the defaults for a particular type or level of element (Folder, Document Group, Document). This gives you a huge amount of flexibility for formatting individual parts of your manuscript in different was if you want to – but here you didn’t, so turning the box off defaults to the standard formatting for all text.