Up to a couple of days ago I was able to compile a PDF from the Scrivener project file. I’ve ONLY been adding new chapters (text - no illustrations) as I’ve been writing. I’ve been compiling it for my beta readers to read and up until a couple of days ago it was working. Now the file goes through the compile but never crosses over to processing the “pages” (counting them up as it writes the file) to produce the final PDF file I am after. (I’ve let the compile sit for well over 20 mins with nothing happening). And this is the ONLY file where the PDF has dropped off.
All of my other project files work. PDFs created as many times as I want. I can’t see why this one file has become problematic since all I"ve added are text (chapters).
Anyone else run into this? Do I need to rebuild the file and thus lose my snapshots for historical purposes?
Any assist would be sincerely appreciated. I will need to PDF this doc as I use that for CreateSpace to create the printed copy.
Halts like this are typically accompanied by an error or debugging message on the Console. Could you check there and see if Scrivener or the system in general is producing any messages once it gets to the point where progress seems to cease?
The most common cause of this when images are not involved, by the way, is the presence of a bad Unicode character somewhere in the text. These can cause the underlying conversion engine to get locked up and either crash or hang indefinitely. One way to check for them is to copy and paste some of the more recently edited documents into TextWranger and use it Text/Zap Gremlins… menu command to hunt for them. If you set it to replace the gremlin with another character, you can search for it and attempt to remove the original from Scrivener.
Also, whenever you run into something like this, you can usually narrow down precisely which file(s) have glitches in them by selecting compiling only portions of the book at once. The most efficient tactic is to work in recursive halves. So for instance compile half of the book, then the other half, then in the A/B that fails, compile that section in halves, and repeat until you’ve isolated the culprit file.
Just out of curiosity, does RTF work? PDF requires running a lot of complicated and third-party code on top of everything else Scrivener does. If RTF works, that may indicate more accurately where the problem exists.