I would like to see how my document is going to be formatted before I hit compile. It’s really a pain for me to have to pretty much guess if the document is going to format the way I want it to and if I get it wrong I pretty much have to start all over again. I just feel I shouldn’t have to do that and it’s getting to the point where I’m refusing to use Scrivener for anything but outlining. Even then, I’m thinking about not using Scrivener completely because of that.
You shouldn’t need to start from scratch every time – you can save any custom compile settings and reload them whenever you want, so it’s easy to make incremental changes. As you get closer to what you want you just save the settings each time and make another change, and save the new settings (with a new name so that if it doesn’t work you can go back to the previous settings). I think there are videos or tutorials about compile – and the manual should explain everything.
I obviously can’t speak for Keith, but I suspect that the problem with implementing a “Preview” button would be that the program would have to compile the document in the background in order to construct the preview – so you might just as well do an ordinary compile.
Martin.
This recent thread explains the difficulties.
You don’t even need to save the settings. The compile settings are saved in the project they are associated with every time you compile, so you can just keep tweaking. Not to a named preset, mind you, but they will be just as you left them the last time you tried to compile your project.
If it just takes too long, you can temporarily de-select everything past the first chapter/section. That will load everything faster. Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can get preview to re-load a file that has changed since it last loaded it. So just compile to the same file over and over until you’ve got everything just right. THEN save it as a custom compile preset, so that the next project can benefit from your efforts.
Indeed, it would be impossible for Scrivener to show you how the text is going to look as an epub opened in various programs, or a .mobi opened on the Kindle, or a .doc file opened in Word. The only way it could do that is to compile the text and then open it in one of those programs. The blue preview area in the “Formatting” pane shows you how each section of text will look, though.
All the best,
Keith