I am compiling using the paperback format which justifies both the left and right margins. But it sometimes ends up looking awful. Something like:
It was a dark and stormy night in Megalopolisvilleshireberg.
So the really long word at the end should auto-hyphen to break up the big spaces.
How can I get my compiled manuscript in paperback format to left/right justify and still look right?
Hyphenation is something that has spotty support—it’s actually a fairly complicated process and we have access to one tool which does an pretty decent job of hyphenation within the text engine (you can switch that on in the Editor preferences pane). It was thought that we had access to another tool that could perform this for PDF, however it’s recently come to light that this doesn’t work even though the internal options in the PDF converter are there. So that might end up being removed in future updates, I’m not sure what the status is on that.
Right now the best way to get hyphenation is make sure the file is compiled to one of the word processor formats and that this is opened in a word processor that respects the hyphenation setting. If you are using OpenOffice, you would want to use the ODT compile format. RTF and DOC/X work for Microsoft Word. Support for hyphenation isn’t universal however, so if you are opening the file in Pages or some other word processor you might have to turn it on again after compiling.
Okay that said, hyphenation and the full justification of lines when coming up against a long non-Dictionary word has always been problematic for software to generation a solution for. URLs can really make a mess of things for instance. For final “galley proofing” you’d really want to go through each page line by line and insert hyphens wherever the software just gave up. Using something like Word that provides a camera ready preview of each page precisely how it will print out. Obviously, by that point in time you’ve stopped using the .scriv project for edits as it would just be too prohibitive to go back and redo all of the fine-tuning each time you compile.
Thanks for the detailed response. I figured going line by line through a Word doc would be what I would have to do in the end. It’s just that the export to Word doesn’t take the font I set for my headers and when I change the font in Word, it only changes it for that page. I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to use Word for that reason. So much extra work.
But, in the end, what must be done, must be done.
I haven’t used Word for some time, but surely you ought to be able to do a “Search and Replace” for the font. One of the tricks for putting styles into a document that has been written in Scrivener is to put headings and so forth in a specific size of font, and do a Search and Replace on the compiled text, formatting each specific font size in a particular style. I always found that one of the few really useful tools in Word was its ability to Search and Replace on formatting.
Martin.
PS: if you mean page headers, could you not just delete the whole lot and insert them in Word? Or do you have a different header for each page?
I realise I forgot to mention where the hyphenation setting is. 
In the Compile screen, the Layout settings pane, there will be a checkbox in the upper 1/4 for any format that supports it.
As Martin points out, the trick is using Word’s select all by format feature. You can put your cursor in a chapter title, right click, and through the Style menu choose to select all ranges in the document that share this particular formatting. If you’ve used Scrivener’s compile Formatting pane to generate these, you know they will be consistent. Once you’ve selected all of the chapter titles throughout the manuscript, you can just hit the “Header 1” stylesheet application button and now it’s dynamic. If you prefer working in stylesheets, you might want to do that for your body text and any other uniquely formatted items as well—it takes five or ten minutes and your document will be much more agile for it.
Thanks for the tips on Word Select all by formatting. I did not know about that one! And Word’s auto-hyphenation seems to do the trick as well, even if it is a little over zealous.
It’s too bad that Scrivener doesn’t support hyphenation on pdfs or print though. Because for some reason, Word is giving me only 37 lines of type per page when I export but the pdf gives me 39. This increases my overall page count from 349 to 366 unfortunately. So I’m still sort of beating my head about how to export. I want to keep the page count down, but I don’t want it to look bad.
There might be options for tweaking the hyphenation algorithm, but I’m not enough of a Word expert to tell you where that is. I do know that in OpenOffice, for instance, you can tell it to not hyphen more than n lines in a row and other stylistic choices like that, and since OOo strives to copy Word, surely that stuff is somewhere.
As for the page layout model, there are bound to be differences. Our PDF is being generated either by the OS X text engine or by Aspose, depending upon your Print Settings mode—completely different layout engine than Word. You might check the header and footer spacing. It could be Word is using more padding here than the PDF engine.