Once a project is compiled it would be helpful to have page numbers present while editing. Otherwise I’m scrolling through pages and opening chapters trying to find specific sections to edit. I know a search function is available, however, page numbering would be much more efficient. Usually I have a pages of notes referring to page numbers and not specific text.
Thanks
The problem is the compiled manuscript isn’t really processed back into the project in any way. The project is used to produce a manuscript, but once that document is created, there is no link back into the project, so it remains unaware of page numbers and things like that. Since this is in the wish list section, you probably already know that. Doing this would probably prove to be next to impossible. Here is a simple example: If the binder somehow stored page numbers from the compiled product (and there are issues with even that basic premise), what would happen when you start editing? What if you marked several paragraphs to be cut from your paper proof, and then dutifully remove them in Scrivener—now everything below that point is going to be off by whatever amount of space those paragraphs took up. The page numbers would be obsolete, and this problem would only get worse as you continued editing. The only real way to solve this would be to essentially compile in the background, constantly, and somehow inject that information back into the project. This would be a huge performance hog. Load up Project statistics just to get a taste of what that would be like. Every time you edited anything you’d have to wait that long for the interface to respond. Project statistics does just that: it compiles in the background to get its information on page counts—that’s why it takes a few seconds to build that information.
Coming in the next version, there will be the ability to view your documents with pagination in a pseudo-page layout view. In fact, if printed use the Print feature (not compile), the result will be very similar. However it is important to stress that pagination will not be universal (you won’t be able to load up some random section in the middle of the draft and see that it is page 180), unless you view the entire thing in edit scrivenings. Even then, there will in most cases not be a 1:1 correlation because compile can produce a dramatically different result from what is visible in the Draft. Not only can entire sections be omitted, but font and other structural additions and subtractions can occur. What you could do is use a compile setup that mimics the draft as closely as possible. That would get you pretty close. Using a compiled manuscript alongside a full Edit Scrivenings would get you close, so long as the contents of the Draft are all being compiled (all have “Include in Draft” checked). I haven’t tried that, but in theory it should work.
Another thing you can do right now is alter your compile settings to be more positionally informative. I’m assuming that since you are using these compiles to proof to paper, it doesn’t really matter if they follow any external conventions. In other words you can add information that you’d otherwise not want available in a submission copy. Try turning on titles for all types of documents. That will help you get things narrowed down easier, and then instead of using page numbers you can use section names and maybe paragraph numbers to cross-reference in your notes.
If your binder items are rather large (i.e. one chapter = one file), then this tip might be less useful, but it might be another reason to consider breaking things down further. If you’d really rather keep things in larger files like that, you could consider using the annotation feature to insert hidden breaks. For your proofs you can leave these annotations on and use them to more rapidly find where you are. When you create a submission copy, you can instruct the compiler to strip them out.