Hey there.
I am new to Scrivener. I love it so far.
What I am trying to do is use metadata fields in my footer.
The values pasted in the metadata fields are font images.
When I compile I see the unrendered tag for my meta data field
ie. <$custom:ToolGlyph>
Do any of you gurus out there know what I might be doing wrong?
Jim
Welcome! Glad to hear you’re enjoying learning Scrivener.
It’s worth noting there is already an existing feature request for allowing use of the <$img…> placeholder in these fields, so what you’re trying to do isn’t possible anyway at a technical level. All it supports is lightly formatted text.
More to your query though, the placeholder help file has this to say about placeholder usage, under the Header and Footer subsection:
Not all placeholders are supported in headers and footers. In addition to the special header and footer placeholders specified below (which can only be used in headers and footers), only the placeholders listed under the sections Page Numbers, Current Date and Time, and User and Project Information are supported in headers and footers.
So, it doesn’t matter if the ToolGlyph field has an image reference in it, or the text “BlahBlahBlah” typed into it, it cannot take document level metadata and insert it into the header or footer, for reasons noted in this older thread.
@AmberV Super explanation. Thank you.
Can you think of any other creative ways I could achieve page adornments in the footer?
Thanks,
Jim
Fonts are going to be your main weapon! Seeing as how you can choose the font that is used for the header and footer independently, you could select a WingDing style font for the footer, and that would open up a great deal of symbols, decorative flourishes and so forth.
Of course if you do that you wouldn’t be able to use the footer for anything else like page numbers. So if you do need this and that, then browsing the Unicode table for symbols is your next best bet.
Lastly, of course, Scrivener’s compile feature set is mainly meant to make your job as easy as possible once you get into desktop publishing software, or minimally some kind of word processor like LibreOffice. That is typically where you’d start doing things Scrivener itself cannot do.
I see. But I am still restricted from using page level meta data to drive the footer.
Correct, it could only ever be a global image/glyph/symbol, for the reasons given the second link, above. It doesn’t have any concept of pages really, and one page might be host to more than one “document” as well.
Is the purpose of this have a kind of chapter-based symbol? If so then by default you will at least get the structure you need into the compiled output: the section break. This, along with also generating a page break, is what is needed to change header and footer layout on the fly. So while Scrivener can’t insert the image, or change much within the content (if text based), it will at least make it easier to go through in LibreOffice, Word or whatever, and add what you want per chapter.
If this needs to be even more detailed than chapter level, I’m honestly not sure what the best solution is (it’s a bit out of my area of experience, as I do all of my final layout using other kinds of tools). It’s the kind of query you might find answers for when looking through publishing forums and communities though, like InDesign discussions.
This is great. What other tools do you use for final layout?
Myself, I almost exclusively use LaTeX, which is primarily used in academic writing and the sciences, but it’s also a good general purpose design tool (you can see a bit of what it is capable of by looking at the Scrivener user manual itself!). We even have a project template for it, in the Non-Fiction section, and for those that don’t like writing with it directly (like myself), there is Markdown to LaTeX conversion in the compile menu.
Totally different way of working though, and not one that I would recommend to those that are more inclined toward the “GUI” way of doing things. For example, here are some people discussing how to add an image to the footer. If it looks more like a bunch of programmers talking about source code, well, you wouldn’t be far off. 