Setting margins is a total nightmare and I can find 3 or 4 supposed ways to fix the issue (i.e., I’ve been searching for answers), none of which work. Frustrating is an understatement.
I’m on a Mac and want to have .5" margin left, and .45" margin right. But it is impossible to get any margin to be less than one inch, even though I’ve set new documents to open that way (they don’t), and converted document to adopt my settings (they won’t), have set the margins in the global preferences, turned off “use fixed width editor” (theoretically unnecessary, but when desperate . . .) and set editor margins to 0, attempted to set margins on the page view using ruler (unable to go less than an inch, while I can go greater), . . .
As I typed this I tried yet again. This is the most absolutely frustrating thing ever.
I also tried Format, Paragraph, Tabs and Indents. In theory, great. The ruler shows the correct margins and indents. But the text WILL NOT honor the settings.
I’m just wondering what other surprises lay in the future if setting margins is this difficult. Wow.
Sorry for the obvious steam here, but I really hope someone can give me the answer so I can get on with what I bought the software for.
Nonetheless, a critique of Scrivener must include what should be rather obvious. There are too many similar and seemingly identical settings in various places that are extremely confusing. It’s not only margin settings.
It’s not “just” page setup! It’s within the page settings, but there is a dropdown at the top of the pop-up that I did not notice. Clicking it revealed Scrivener 3 settings. There, setting margins actually DOES something.
The fundamental challenge is that there are at least three different “margins” that might be of interest to the writer, and they are not necessarily the same.
The margins used to define the text area of the author’s own working drafts. (These are defined in the Page Setup pane.)
The right and left indents around a particular paragraph, whether standard text or something like an epigram or block quote. (These are defined by the ruler for the paragraph. Note that the ruler zero is set to the left margin from (1). )
The margins in the final output document, which can itself take a variety of different forms. (These are defined via the Compile command.)
Thank you. Yes, I see there are a lot of different views that one may want to adjust margins/indents for. Understandable for sure. I have to believe that things can be laid out a little more clearly so one knows just what view the settings are to affect. Hopefully that can be worked on going forward.
@brntoki - your post doesn’t say if you looked in the manual. I get the impression you only used the traditional trial-and-error way, testing and testing. Scrivener is a very complex software and hence takes time to learn.
One of the most important things to learn as new user is the basic design idea behind Scrivener. It’s not a Word clone with some added functionality. It’s not a wysiwyg word processor at all. Some call it a writing tool but I usually call ot an authoring tool. It’s mainly designed for the creative part of the writing process in creative writing.
So forget everything you’ve learned about Word or Pages and look at it with fresh eyes. Why would you need page margin settings when there is no page?
It’s not really accurate to describe these as “views.” The original page size, the paragraph dimensions, and output page size are fundamentally different things, they are not simply different ways of looking at the manuscript.
That is actually a good question. I use a lot of fairly involved software and can usually find my way around new software easily. I did first just plunk around to see what I could figure out. After a bit of that, I turned to an internet search. I actually found the answer straight away; go to Page Setup. The problem was that I didn’t notice the Page Attributes dropdown at the top and thought that just adding a custom size, with no margins, would allow me to get on with things. Obviously, it didn’t.
After a lot more searching online and, yes, actually reading the manual, I had come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t possible. I did actually find a post to that affect somewhere, and I couldn’t find anything specifically about margins in the manual, just indents that were figured from the preset margins. I did a search in the help menu and margin actually returned . . . zero results! I was starting to think I needed to get comfortable with the idea that there was less rich text like functionality than I thought from the short trial I took.
I don’t remember what led me to finally try again, but when I did go to Page Setup once more I noticed the Page Attributes settings which had an option for Scrivener 3. So, I think the manual, thorough as it is, may not give enough information about margins.
Even if they are different and meant for different purposes, they are still showing the same text on a virtual page. I don’t know how that is fundamentally different. And how many views are there for, say, the manuscript, where it makes sense that one would fuss with margins? I mean, just edit mode and page view, no? I understand that compile is a different thing, sure.
But I’m interested to hear you say that because I was left wondering why the basic page margin settings are buried and not easy to figure out, since ostensibly the “Page View” must be just for getting the general idea of how text would be put down on the page. I get the idea of not being hung up on the formatting when trying to get one’s writing done, but the page view is there for a reason, and I struggle to find any reason it should be there if not for giving users who desire so to “preview” their manuscript without actually printing it. And, if that is what it’s for, then being able to easily set margins is rather a must.
I’m genuinely curious what the page view would be for if not for that.
BTW, there seemed to be a lot of posts around the web on setting page margins, so I’m not alone in thinking this is harder to figure out than what it should be.
I am impressed by Scrivener though. I quickly decided not to go with a competing software because it didn’t offer the chance to have a quick view of how the printed page might look. It was markup only.
I’d rather say that page view is to make it easier to write, if your mind sort of wants to handle “pages” and not a continuous scrolling canvas. It’s not really meant to give an accurate wysiwyg view of the compiled output. It doesn’t even have to be the same font as the compiled ouput!
“For most uses, page view is for simulating the look and feel of writing on real
pages, and is thus an aesthetic preference, not a print preview tool. In some cases,
especially where the compiled product will look identical to the formatting you
see in the editor, it can be used as a fairly accurate gauge of writing progress in
terms of literal pages. Read on for tips on the best ways to set up this feature for
this style of working.”
Posting this from the manual to answer your question, not as RTFM feedback.
Negative on the interactive tutorial. But I did go into the user manual in a little more detail. Indeed, the info is in there regarding margins, in some cases almost cryptic I’d say, and if one came across the “wrong” section first, would probably conclude that the margins can’t actually be set.
I get what you are saying on the people who may just like a traditional page view. Yeah, that makes sense. I am more than a little into design myself, and so seeing a fairly accurate idea of how my writing will look as a finished product encourages me to keep at it. So, I am probably not the most typical user in that regard.
Thanks for your input!
Let me add, since I finally did solve my issue and get on with some real work yesterday, I am very happy with Scrivener. It really is powerful and massively helpful to get ideas down and organized. Really, really liking it so far, and I’ve just scratched the surface of its capabilities, I know.
If memory serves, Page View was added to the app specifically to serve screenwriters. In that business pages are used as a guide to minutes of screen time. So scriptwriters literally us what manuscript page they are on as an active guide while writing. That Manual paragraph is elliptically refering to this — that while Page View is not generally an accurate print preview, if you are using a highly standardized format such as you get standardly with scriptwriting mode, it can get within snuff and thus accurately reflect what page of a script you are on.
So, that is how Page View came to be. Notice that from a scriptwriter’s point of view, altering the margin setting would ruin the whole point of Page View. The whole pages-correspond-to-minutes thing depends on the use of a highly standardized script format with fixed margins.
-gr
P.S. I agree that the Scrivener settings of Page Setup is an out of the way place one would not naturally think to go to monkey with what margins you get in Page View. There should probably be some Page View centric spot in Scriv preferences that duplicates access to that setting. That would be a good thing.
