I’m sure I’m doing something wrong at a basic level, but here’s my problem.
I’ve set the Scrivener editor up to roughly match a BBC script layout. The page width is 16 cm, and all the styles have been set to the same font, font size, paragraph spacings etc. However on Scrivener it looks very different to how I’m used to it looking on Word, my old go-to script-writing platform. The amount of text you can type on a line in Scrivener is less that on Word. And if I set my Scrivener styles to visually match a BBC layout and then compile it, it overshoots the page boundaries in Word.
Did that make any sense? A picture paints a thousand words, so here are two screen grabs.
Top image: Word layout
Bottom image: Scrivener layout
But it’s the same right margin that is set in Word, if you compare the images. If I lengthen that style setting in Scrivener to get the correct layout, when compiled in Word it displays far wider than the same 16cm right margin, and spews over the right-hand side of the page.
I haven’t done screenplay formatting with Scrivener, but one of Scrivener’s fundamental concepts is the format you use while editing can be different from the final output format.
Set your Editor ruler as you like while editing. In your “Output to Word” compiler settings (Formatting tab), set your ruler as you like for when you output your script to Word. The ruler settings don’t have to be the same.
