I have just bought Scrivener thinking it would be like Microsoft Word, only much, much better and friendlier toward what writers want word processors for, and I have to say that so far I am a bit disappointed. I downloaded the trial version and went through the tutorial and it was more than enough to convince me to buy, but when i tried importing my book to Scrivener I noticed one important detail that had not been mentioned; the complete lack of page customisation. I have looked for hours now and have found that it i possible to set a ‘page layout view’ …but only on mac. Also the lack of page breaks also annoys me greatly, I love to see how my book might appear virtually before its printed.
In word my book is structured as 7" x 10" (17.78cm x 25.4cm) and I cannot find any way of setting up a document in Scrivener to allow me to work within that space, instead it is like typing one long, unbroken and extremely wide document. I am hoping this will change but it is enough of a nuisance to where I feel I have wasted my money and am reluctantly continuing to use word instead as its frustrations are fewer.
Could any veterans to the programme help me out?? Thanks!
Are you mainly looking for a more comfortable writing area? If so that’s all stuff we have plans to improve, very specific plans (yes, much of that is a part of the older Mac version that we’re still developing toward). There will be a way to keep line-lengths in a narrower column than occupying the entire window, as well as presenting simulated sheets of paper you can “type on”. These are all more complicated things that were not deemed first priority in development, but they’ll be coming.
It should be stressed however that none of that is really meant to turn Scrivener into a layout program. That’s just a whole different line of software. This has always been and always will be a writing program, not a desktop publishing program. I don’t think that is what you are asking for, though, just some of the same aesthetic options a word processor may provide.
Sorry you didn’t see that this software was in fact an intentional step away from “the word processor” (we’ve got plenty enough of those already!). The impetus for its creation as well as the popularity of it has been very much a product of the fact that it works completely different from how programs like Word work (although most of the basic typing and formatting tools will be familiar). Some people find that to be quite enlightening, but those that try to make Scrivener act like Word are just in for a tough time, in my experience. This was never meant to be a replacement for Word, but the tool you use before you go into a program like that.
A couple of points:
One thing a lot of people come to appreciate with Scrivener is that unlike Word, you can make sections of text only as long as they themselves need to be, rather than having to lump text together merely to make life more convenient for yourself. Writing a book into 500 different .docx files in My Documents would be a nightmare, but in Scrivener that’s second nature, that’s just how it is designed to work. I have some books with more than a thousand individual sections. So the “long” part may be mitigated by that as you grow more accustomed to this different approach to writing.
For width, if the text is too long to be comfortably read, why do you have the window so wide to begin with? I don’t really follow why this is a major problem (I definitely see room for improvement, don’t get me wrong, but there is a reason we put these aesthetic features on the back-burner). I routinely size windows to fit the content on my computer, it’s just habit and I don’t really think about it. It’s true there are some cases where you might want the window wider than is optimum for the text, maybe you like to use the Inspector, but don’t want it always up in your face—you have to leave a little extra window width to accommodate when it is there. You can experiment with dragging the Binder out a bit wider to compensate. That gives you more room to see the more descriptive titles you may have, anyway. Keeping vertical editor splits up all of the time is another way to keep the window very wide, if that is what you want, without having very wide lines of text (see View/Layout/Split Vertically).
One last thing, there is a place where the line width has a cap: View/Enter Full Screen (or F11). This is a bare bones, pure writing environment. You load up a section you want to get some work done, and shove aside pretty much the entire computer. You can set the width with the slider down at the bottom of the screen (slide the mouse down if you don’t see settings).
Even though Scrivener is not designed as a WYSIWYG editor, there’s another way to cap the width for the body text: set a right margin with the ruler, or better yet, adjusting the line spacing to have a maximum length. I’ve found this useful when trying to visualize how the actual text will look like, following the guidelines given here.
Be cautious setting the right indent on the ruler. This isn’t a margin but a paragraph-specific indent saved as part of the formatting, which means that if you don’t do the calculations correctly for your compiled paper and margin size, you can end with text falling too short of the right edge or running right off the page.
Consider the sides of the editor as the inside boundaries of your compiled margin; text wrapping at the editor edges will wrap at the margin, whatever it is, when you compile. If the left margin is 1.5in, then the 6in mark on the ruler in the editor marks 7.5in from the left edge of the paper.
If you want to keep the text with no right indent, so that it’s still set to wrap at the margin, take a look at the Editor settings in Tools > Options–you can increase the editor margin there, creating some padding at the sides of the editor without affecting the actual formatting. (The editor margins also have no effect on the compiled margin, which is set in the compile Page Settings.)