I copied the placeholders page from the Help/List of All Placeholders… palette window. I then made a new document in a test Scrivener project in the Manuscript folder and pasted the whole thing (all placeholders) into that document. When I compile this document as PDF, the placeholder tags show up as is. Example: “<$template_firstName>” is printed where “Randall” should instead appear.
Same with all of the other placeholders in this document.
???
OK, so this is true only of a few of the placeholders, specifically the Template placeholders. So, the reason I want to use Template Placeholders for Author information is that I don’t want to have to re-enter this information with every Compile. Is there a way to tell Scivener to extract my information from my Contacts page for every Compile?
Can I map my Contacts info to?:
<$forename>, <$firstname>,
<$surname>, <$lastname>,
<$initial>
<$author>, <$name>, <$fullname>, <$username>
From the relevant help section:
Template placeholders are useful when putting together a project you intend to turn into a template using File > Save as Template. When a Scrivener project is created from a template, all of the following placeholders will be replaced with the relevant data before the project appears on screen. You can thus use these placeholders to create templates that include user-specific information such as name and address, which can be useful for setting up title pages.
Tip: To create a new project without having these placeholders automatically replaced, hold down the Option key while clicking on “Choose…” in the New Project template chooser panel. (This is useful for updating templates or creating your own templates based on existing ones.)
If you want the Compile command to fill in the author information, probably you should use the User and Project Information placeholders instead.