My novel has a pretty straightforward organization; it’s just chapters (folders) containing scenes (documents). The folders are typed (by structure) as “chapter,” naturally, which is bound to a format that has only “title” checked in the “section layout” editor. The documents are similarly typed as “scene” which is bound to a format that has only “text” checked.
When I compile, the output has a spurious carriage return ¶ after the heading for each chapter.
I believe I’ve tracked it down to the “separators.” I want a custom separator between scenes, but no separator at all before them. When I change the “separator before sections” to nonsense text, that appears instead of the ¶. But no matter what I choose for that separator, I can’t eliminate that carriage return. Is that enough for someone to help me figure out what I’m doing wrong, or should I add pictures?
I don’t think two documents can sequentially compile within a single paragraph.
The way you explain it is a bit confusing (perhaps even contradicts itself in one place), but if what you are saying you want is : HEADING. Followed by body text, like this, right after on the same line.
I don’t think that it can be done this way (from two documents), no matter the separator setting.
And if that is what you want, I believe you need to use a Heading style that is set to character attributes only, on top of your heading being part of the body text document.
Just like I thought, it doesn’t (or doesn’t seem – I ran a quick test) to work across two separate documents.
You’d either have to do it the way I said, manually inserting the title to the body text of your first scene within a chapter (or use a placeholder - but I won’t get into that, as things are already complicated enough as it is for the moment) , or have this first scene actually be the chapter’s folder document (having the chapter’s title as its title) , and assign it a different section type/section layout than the section type/layout combo assigned to the remaining scenes of your chapter, with the above mentioned option checked (title as run in head) for this specific first-scene’s section layout.
To put it simply, assuming by your description that your chapter’s parent document/folder is already assigned a different section type/section layout than your scenes, you could just move (in editor copy/paste) the body text of your first scene to the parent document/folder, delete your first scene from the binder (or exclude it from compile ← which though may later lead to confusion), and then tweak the section layout assigned to your chapter’s parent document/folder as described.
It goes without saying that you’ll first want to do a backup of your project.
@dondo: When I compile, the output has a spurious carriage return ¶ after the heading for each chapter.
I’ll take a different route than the two above answers, as to me, spurious in this context means something other than the ordinary, where the ordinary here would be a heading that is in a vertical block above the first paragraph (to describe layout as design, rather than the mechanical pieces we might use to achieve it, such as carriage returns). So you aren’t looking to remove the vertical arrangement (move the heading into the first paragraph, which would be to remove all newlines, not just spurious ones), but that there are empty paragraphs between vertical elements in the document, which is of course undesirable.
To that end, changing the Separator before sections to “Single Return” should do the trick, but it may help to know what compile format you started from, and which layouts you are using within it. I suppose another approach could be to go into the separator settings for the heading itself and ticking the Override separator after checkbox, and changing that to “Single Return”. Normally you shouldn’t have to do that, but in some cases it can be useful.
The other places these might be coming from are the Section Layout itself. Go through the Title Options and Prefix tabs, and make sure there are no empty lines in the title suffix or prefix fields.
Lastly of course is the text editor itself. Use View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Invisibles, and make sure you don’t have any empty lines in the folder text itself or at the top of the body text. Do note that in Scrivenings mode there will always be at least one empty line, but that’s just there so you can start typing if you want, it won’t be a literal empty line unless you add something to it, such as even a single space.
Once again Amber nailed it. I would have sworn I tried “Single Return” as the separator before section, but apparently not. It had never occurred to me that a heading wouldn’t have at least one carriage return at the end of it, which is why the ambiguity that confused @Vincent_Vincent and @kewms crept into my description; I was assuming that this was an additional separator! Sorry about that.
As I think about these responses, I realize that a separator is not actually part of either section; it occupies the border between a pair of sections, so could equivalently be considered the end of one or the beginning of the next - or really both. So although they are always represented as terminating a section (eg. the ¶ at the end of every paragraph), it makes sense that these would need to be defined as the beginning of the next section, else you couldn’t know what separator to use (per the commentary above about how to try to have no separator at all).
Really interesting and illuminating. Thanks for the insight.
Yes, and for those cases where you want “separators” to be much more strongly defined, that is what the Prefix and Suffix tabs for in Section Layouts. Those are a part of the layout (of course), and will always print regardless of the context of that layout with the other layouts around it. They are of seldom use in rich text formatting, but can be extremely useful when using Scrivener to build markup, like HTML, where a section may need to be inside of a <div> element.
Separators are unique because they aren’t technically a part of the layout, but inserted between layouts based on, as put above, their context. A sequence of scenes will trigger the “between” separator, because these are layouts of a kind. The “before” and “after” separators trigger when a layout is adjacent to another kind. That is a useful place to insert “* * *” breaks between scenes, for instance. So they let us insert things logically rather than always.