I just sent my first manuscript to a developmental editor last night. I used the Microsoft Word - Times preset in Scrivener’s Compile to generate the Word doc. When I checked over the exported file in LibreOffice, it looked great. But I noticed in LibreOffice’s Navigator that a bunch of “bookmarks” had been added with the names of some (but not all) of the individual Scrivener documents that I selected for the compile.
It’s not the end of the world. None of them showed up in the manuscript text itself, but ideally they wouldn’t be there. They obviously give away spoilers as they are descriptions to remind me of what is in each of the documents. And maybe they’d also show up in Microsoft Word when my editor is working on the book.
Any guesses how these are getting added and how I can remove them?
I’ve gone through every setting I can think of, both in Compile and in the general Scrivener settings, and I can’t see any reason they would be added as bookmarks visible in the LibreOffice Word navigator.
Did you assign Styles to your Chapter Headings?
Does the manuscript include a Table of Contents?
It’s possible that LibreOffice is using the heading structure of the document to generate bookmarks automatically. I’d definitely check their options as well as ours.
Scrivener will by default insert bookmarks at the beginning of sections. These are necessary for the proper functioning of any clickable cross-references in the text, as well as page number referencing in them (that includes Scrivener’s simple table of contents copy and paste tool). If you are writing a novel then these might not be something you have any use for, and they can be safely switched off.
Before going into that, do note that word processing bookmark anchors are not the sort of thing that end up in the final product for publication, in most circumstances. I suppose if the intent is to distribute a .docx file to readers, that’s one thing, but outside of beta reader copies that would be a bit unusual. So you may safely choose to not bother with it. Only your editor will be spoiled, if they check the bookmark list, and presumably that’s not a big deal.
But, if you do want them off, here’s what to do:
Checklist
Open File ▸ Compile... and double-click on the compile Format you are using, in the left sidebar, to edit it.
In the Section Layouts pane, go through any of the bold faced layouts (which indicates they are in use by the project), and in the Settings tab, disable the Include in RTF bookmarks option.
You may of course remove it for all Layouts if you want, or only some of them (perhaps it makes sense at the chapter level, but not upon individual subsections).
It turns out that it was grabbing text from both the Sections and the Chapter Headings and turning those RTFs off fixed it.
But I hear what you are saying about bookmarks perhaps being useful. Ideally, though, it would just use the Chapter numbers and not the text I included for my own reference. Is there a way to have that in the bookmarks and not the actual text for the chapter folders?
There isn’t. It just uses the binder name since not everything that gets bookmarked might even be generating a title. I’ll put in a note to see if it can be made to use the section title, if one is created, though. That seems like a good idea to me overall.
