Okay, fifth attempt finally worked. I remain uncertain why it didn’t work the first five times, but I finally produced a manuscript copy without imbedded hash marks. Thanks for the guidance. david
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I’m trying to compile a mss on scrivener for mac 3.3.6, but I keep getting extra lines. I like to have no indents and one space between paragraphs. However, when compiling I end up with 3 blank lines, as it reads a line break as a section break maybe? I removed the hashtags, but I can’t remove the lines. I’m not a newbie to scrivener but definitely a newbie to this problem.
Any ideas anyone? Thanks in advance!
This is a reply to another post you may find helpful:
Thank you. Yes, I guess the empty lines are ALL interpreted as breaks? The problem is how to change that so when compiling it copies the same one-line break as in my scrivener text. Now, it makes three lines, one line break, one hashtag (erased), and then one more line. I just want it to be the same as my text. Hmmm…I think I can find/replace them all, but that doesn’t work easily in word…sigh…
There are other ways to fix the spaces and markers and/or output correctly direct from Scrivener, but I’m not a mac person and am still getting used to v. 3 and the compile settings, however…
The hashtags and section breaks can be overridden/chosen in compile, but you will have to “Duplicate and Edit Format” from the supplied “manuscript” template. Then you will be able to select your preferred section break type. The supplied Manuscript Templates can’t be modified directly. (on windows “duplicate & edit” is in the right-click contextual menu when you highlight the template names in the first compile window)
Hopefully someone will chime in soon with the appropriate Mac-attack to help you out.
Yes, please refer to the existing discussion above, which this was merged into, regarding how to adjust either your source material or the compile format to work with your source material more productively.
As an aside, if you prefer spacing between paragraphs instead of indents, that’s perfectly fine, but the best way to do that (by that I mean, in a fashion that will work seamlessly with all of the stock compile setups) is something like the following:
- Create a new text entry in your binder, purely for setting this up.
- Paste in a few paragraphs of text to play with, and remove any empty lines between them. Each line should be directly adjacent.
- Select all of the lines, and use the
Format ▸ Paragraph ▸ Line and Paragraph Spacing...menu command. What you want to do here is add spacing after each paragraph. You can control precisely how much to add, but a general rule of thumb is that an amount equal to your font size is about one line. So if you type in 14pt, try adding 14pt of spacing—but now that you do have control, you might find a little less than that looks better on the eye. No harm in experimenting here, that’s why we made a test file. - Upon closing that, you’ll see what looks like a document that has been double-returned, except it isn’t—and now you can easily compile this to formats that maybe do use indents instead of spacing, without a bunch of customisation.
- Optionally, if the lines do still have indents, you may want to use
Format ▸ Paragraph ▸ Tabs and Indents.... In this tool, zero out the first-line and left indent fields and save those settings. Now you should have a clean spaced-paragraph sample. - With your cursor in any of these test paragraphs, use
Format ▸ Make Formatting Default, and save your preference to global settings.
Now, every new document you create will be formatted this way automatically. This won’t change what you’ve already written (review this help file for instructions on that), but for your case the conversion will be complicated by having carriage returns between paragraphs. Those would need to be cleaned out to avoid massive spaces between everything.
An easy way of doing that is to run search and replace for two returns, replacing them with one. You can either copy and paste returns into the Find tool, or use Ctrl+Enter on Windows, or ⌥Return on Mac, to type them into the Find fields.
With such a dramatic change like this, I would definitely consider using File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To... first, saving it alongside your main project, and giving it a name that is clear to its purpose. If something goes wildly wrong you can revert to that copy and get back to where you started—but really having a backup like that is more for peace of mind. Global changes can be stressful if they are done against the only copy you have. With a big fat “undo” reset sitting there, you can feel more free to experiment.
And again, have a look at the posts linked to above. If you don’t want to change how you write (and that is perfectly understandable, I double-space paragraphs as well for different reasons, as I write in Markdown, and it would take a monumental mental project to change that) there are threads linked to that have detailed instructions for different approaches. Some for example, put the find and replace into their compile settings (the Replacements tab is where you can add search and replaces that operating on the fly when you compile), so the original source stays double-spaced and comfortable to their habits, but the compiled output conforms more closely to standard word processing conventions of having each paragraph directly adjacent so that formatting, like spacing, can be applied in a agile manner.
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Amber, this was very helpful. I could get rid of the hashtags, but it still leaves a line there, and an indented place as IF it were a hashtag. So, that didn’t save time getting them to work right. Also, one more question, a couple of the texts were copied and pasted from Word files. Because of that maybe the old formatting was brought in? I’m not sure, but maybe that’s also interfering. (I mean, I didn’t write them in Scrivener originally, only rewrote them.) Thanks for your help!
Never paste into Scrivener from outside apps. Use Paste and Match Style available on Scrivener’s context menu: Right-click and select Paste and Match Style.
For your historically messed documents:
- Ensure you have a default format setup, either globally or per project.
- Convert existing documents to default format: Documents > Convert > Text to Default Formatting.
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@mjpronko : …I could get rid of the hashtags, but it still leaves a line there, and an indented place as IF it were a hashtag…
For the sake of clarity, since I covered a few approaches in this thread, which of the methods did you use to remove empty lines? Secondly, if you use the View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Invisibles menu command, do you see one, and only one, ¶ character at the end of each paragraph, with no lines in the text that are empty with their own pilcrow character too?
I’m just wondering how, if you did follow the steps to make all paragraphs directly adjacent, the compiler would be inserting anything at all between them (empty, centre-aligned or no).
As to your secondary question: the short answer is that there is no one right answer to whether copy and paste is okay to use, because the problems with copy and paste between complicated rich text editors is in the details, not the basic theory. Usually it works fine; sometimes it doesn’t, I think it’s best to just play it out and be wary of oddities when you do.
As to whether in this case it caused a problem, it’s impossible for me to speculate on that without a direct sample of the before and after in Word, to Scrivener, and after whatever steps you took to change the text. But I wouldn’t worry about that angle too much until I’ve had a chance to look at the current condition of the problem directly. From that I might see suspicious clues that could lead to a paste issue, but overall, formatting from another word processor is not going to insert empty lines, physical, empty lines that are triggered by invisible characters that are as “real” as the visible letters around them. That, and the stuff we use to add spaces around things visually, or change the fonts, are two very different things.
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I have learned my lesson! I was putting together a collection of essays written for different publications, but I shoulda…anyway, the documents to convert to text to default was VERY helpful! Thank you!
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Amber, thank you! Ha, now I can see there are extra pilcrows on some of the documents, but not on all. Is there a way to remove those all at once?
I have like 50 documents, and at rough count, half have “double” pilcrows, which is causing the problem. And that double pilcrow problem is because of copy and pasting from various other documents with various formatting. So, my bad, lesson learned.
However, it does seem that some copy and paste added the extra line, and some did not. But from what Kevitec57 noted, I will copy and paste more carefully next time around. I did try to reset to default, but on some documents, it didn’t remove the line.
I definitely get it about the visible, though, which was very helpful.
In the end, most was corrected, but not all, but I could correct it in the compiled word file.
Thank you! That was super-helpful!
All right, that makes a lot more sense then, if there are still empty lines to remove. It may be, if you followed these instructions literally…
…and had three lines in some places instead of two, that the first sweep only removed half of the problem. I’d try these instructions again on an area that still has empty lines. It’s the same exact problem, but search and replace is only going to change what you tell it to. If there are three pilcrows in a row and you tell it to remove two and replace it with one, the paragraphs with three will be reduced to two instead of one, which would still mean an empty line.
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