I am in the final stages of a thesis/dissertation and need to implement recto/verso formatting so that, for example, new sections always begin on the right side page of the document. However, I need to compile to RTF (I am scanning the file with Sente to expand reference tags), and full recto/verso support seems to be only available when you compile to PDF or print.
I’m happy to see that facing-page header/footer seems to work well in compile to RTF, so that solves half the problem!
With respect to new sections beginning on the right side page, I’m thinking that the use of the <$BLANK_PAGE> token might work, but as I don’t know the exact pagination until I compile and scan the document to RTF, it still might not place the blank page in the right place.
Anyone else had to deal with this issue?
(PS This is a really well supported Board, and thanks for all assistance received so far!)
Right, that technology is not available for RTF or any of the word processor formats. With Print/PDF we have a little more control over some things like this, but for most technical documents you’re going to need a more complex document creation tool, such as a word processor, to finish off the production process. Scrivener can only do so much, and I’m assuming you have that in mind since you’re aiming for RTF instead of PDF to begin with—this is just one of those things you’re going to need to add to your post-compile checklist.
Exactly, that’s the compiler’s problem as well. It, like you, isn’t aware of pagination so it doesn’t know when a new chapter break is on this or that side of the book. RTF files (and word processor formats in general) are not paginated—they are just a long stream of text. That is why when you open very long documents in Word, you see the footer bar taking a while to “calibrate” the total page count.
Besides, unless there is a better way of doing this than inserting extra page-breaks in a word processor, you’ll want to save this step for the very end of the finalisation process, rather than the very beginning, as even minor content or formatting changes could cause chapter breaks to end up getting pushed back to the left side.
One of my pet peeves in publishing is when (once) reputable publishers bring out 500–600 page academic tomes with all the pages set as verso no matter whether they are impressed as recto or verso. Typography has gone down the drain in recent years.
There is no excuse for this as page preparation and imposition are features of tools widely available. Word processors might do recto/verso but the results are aesthetically unpleasant. DTP packages (whether commercial or open source) do a much better job of all typographical design considerations. For me the solution to this recto/verso problem in Scrivener is to compile the final version of the document to LaTeX and then tweak the results. But these are all restricted to typographical considerations. If a text correction is needed then I do that in Scrivener and repeat the compile/tweak cycle.
That’s interesting, reepicheep. Does Scrivener recto/verso carry over to LaTex? I’m all for doing as little post-compile ‘tweaking’ as possible. And the aesthetic is a very important consideration.
However, it looks like the biggest obstacle to this approach for me would be that my citation manager (Sente) does not seem to be able to process the LaTex file produced by the compile process in Scrivener. It doesn’t recognise any of the citations.
I use the LaTex preamble to do recto/verso for what ever document class is being used. Typically it’s one TeX line to (re)set an option.
I’ve never used Sente. My bibliographic manager of choice is BibDesk from which I either drag-and-drop the references into Scrivener±—I’ve defined my own format—or add the \cite{} command and then rely on the conventional LaTeX workflow to process the entries.
The small amount of tweaking that references entail I’m happy to do because there will be more work to get good page breaks and other typographic considerations sorted; remember the quote in The TeX Book from G B Shaw who hated the way that typesetters would mess with his text as he preferred to do control page breaks for himself.
I will hack the LaTeX output by hand with emacs/vim but if I know it only requires minimal adjustment then I’ll open the LaTeX file in LyX. By this time the document is finalised so it’s all tweaking for publication so it’s all for show.
Thanks, reepicheep. I have no experience with LaTex so, although it sounds like something I should be using, it’s too late for this project. Looks like I have quite a bit of post-compile tweaking to do…
