I’ve spent most of the day trying to figure out how to get Scrivener to layout pages so they have headers and footers, page numbers and such. It’s late now, and I still don’t know. I’ve combed through the book Take Control of Scrivener, to no avail. The book refers to functions that I cannot find in Scrivener.
I found the insert commands for auto numbers. I used these to calculate the chapter numbers. Presumably the same function could be used to calculate page numbers for footers, but where do you put them? The book describes file/print options for that, but I could not find them in the menu system.
Finally, I compiled to a .doc file and used MS Word to format headers and footers, and this seems to work. Is that what the book means? If so, it could be a lot clearer.
Another question I have is “how do you force a single line into vertical center of a page?” for example to demark a major part. I don’t see how to do it in Scrivener at all. In MS Word I tried inserting blank lines with the return key. All this does is insert pages where I don’t want them. The tab key just moves the line horizontally. Scrivener must be embedding hidden commands that forces MS Word to do that. I couldn’t find an option to insert I never had any problem vertically centering lines with MS Word files before I got Scrivener.
I really want to capture the power of Scrivener, but the documentation makes that really difficult.
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Regarding page headers and footers… appears this is set globally, for the entire project, in the File > Compile > Page Settings dialog.
In the v1.6 Scrivener manual, available in Scrivener via Help > Scrivener Manual, this is discussed on page 220, in section 22.13 Page Settings.
In Gwen Hernandez’s book/ebook Scrivener for Dummies, this is covered at location 4913. Based on the discussion and images there (Figure 12-16 at location 4938), this holds true for both Macintosh and Windows versions of Scrivener.
For something fancier than that, I’m not sure… I suspect you would have to do it outside of Scrivener, but I could be wrong. Scrivener’s focus seems to be more on writing than fancy formatting. From following this and other forums discussing the use of Scrivener, I get the sense that typical books, at least fiction, need only basic formatting. Where more is needed, folks apparently compile/expert from Scrivener to other tools that focus more on complex formatting.
As far as centering text vertically (rather than horizontally)…
I could be wrong, but I doubt that there is an function for doing this in Scrivener. You might be able to fake it via entering empty lines, and checking the results when compile…
In Microsoft Word, at least for Word 2007 and presumably for later versions, see…
office.microsoft.com/en-us/word- … 21481.aspx
I would guess that centering text vertically could prove difficult and problematic, regardless of software used, if the result is ultimately going to be released in multiple formats (various ebook formats as viewed on various ebook/phone/tablet/PC devices, paper, …).
Hope that helps.
Typically you would do this by adding page padding in the Formatting section of compile for the type of file that was going to mark the new section. The padding only applies when the file is also starting a new page (i.e. has “page break before” set for it or is following the Page Break separator set in compile), but if I understand what you’re describing, this is what you want.
For an example, create a new project using the Novel (with Parts) template, then open File > Compile… and expand the window so you can open the Formatting pane there. If you click on the Level 1 folder at the top of the table, you’ll see it’s just compiling as the part number and title. Click “Modify” to open the dialog for formatting and in the upper right you’ll see the page padding setting, 12 lines here. This puts the part number and title about a third down the page for an 8.5x11in paper; about 20 lines would be halfway. You can toy with the number to see what works best for your particular compilation; e-books, for instance, need only a few empty lines.
Also worth noting, in the case of the Novel with Parts template, new Parts start on a new page, followed then by the chapter title and the chapter text. If you wanted the Part title to be all on its own page, you could go to the Separators tab in compile and change the Folder/Folder separator to “Page Break”. Since as you see in the binder, Parts and Chapters are both folders, and scene text is all document files, the Folder/Folder separator is determining how Parts and Chapters are divided while the Folder/Text separator determines the division between the Chapter folder (in this case, the chapter number prefix and chapter title) and the following text.
Thank you very much, Jennifer, Mimetic, and Springfield (and any others I missed) for taking the time to help me get familiar with Scrivener. It’s a steep learning curve for me, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.