When using scrivenings in page view (i.e. viewing several elements as one document) I would like to have different ways to separate individual elements that more closely resemble Compile preferences. I’m thinking on two things in particular:
In Compile I show the Title of folders and the text of any other document. Would it be possible to show the titles of elements only if they are marked to be shown under Compile’s Formatting pane?
Would it be possible to eliminate blank spaces? I would also like the option to eliminate crop marks or horizontal lines and replace them with a simple marginal red point (more broadly: something less intrusive than crop marks), so that the view resembles more closely the output. (And since this is a wish list, let me go crazy: I’d love if I could hover on that red point and see the element title as a tip, and clicking on that red point would reveal the element in the binder).
I know that page view is not meant as a wysiwyg editor and I understand the limits, e.g. footnotes, accurate pagination, autonumbers are out of the scope of this request. But the flow of page view, in my opinion, should resemble what the reader will have.
To my knowledge this is not possible, but please let me know if I’m wrong. And thanks for reading!
The crop mark option shouldn’t be adding any vertical space to the document, either in standard or page view mode. Is there perhaps some formatting around it that is adding paragraph spacing, or maybe even stray paragraph breaks?
I use folders only to enclose documents and provide (numbered) titles, they don’t have any text. Because the folder has no text in it, it appears as a blank line in scrivenings with crop marks.
Ah, I see what you mean. I can’t think of a good way around that as too many people use Scrivenings prior to have filled up every single document with at least one line of text. For instance many start in on it after having outlined a few ideas, and so much of the session contains empty files and folders. Even a option to hide empty documents from the view might generate too much confusion if it gets accidentally turned on, or forgotten. If nobody ever mixed empty with filled documents in Scrivenings, then I suppose the matter would be different, but that’s just too common a task for it to be a safe support-friendly option.
This is an opinion, of course, and nothing wrong with it—being an opinion—but there are many who feel opposite. That a reader-friendly presentation is not actually an author-friendly presentation. That in fact the presentation that an author sees should often hardly resemble the final copy at all. Scrivener isn’t totally in that camp, but on a line between 0 and 10 where 0 is Microsoft Word and 10 is LaTeX or something totally non-WYSIWYG, Scrivener would be around 4 or 5 with a non-default Original compile workflow, and a 6 or 7 with a more typical compile method that alters all page and text formatting. It’s a presentational editor, so it does show you italic letter glyphs when you select italic, but it can turn those italics into underscored text, as well, or vice versa, for those that find working in italics too difficult to read.
In short, Page View is meant to be an aesthetic choice or those that “like to see pages go by”, not a compiler preview, at least in its current incarnation. It probably won’t ever be a true compiler preview as that would take way too much background processing. For it to become a true compiler preview, the software would have to move more toward the 0 end of the line, and a lot of people really prefer that it isn’t like that kind of software at all and wouldn’t want to see it become more like a traditional word processor that shows you what the print looks like while you are working.
Oh one thing I forgot to mention: in regards to finding the title of the current document you are working in, this is displayed in the header bar for the editor. The name of the sub-document you are editing is printed after the group name. The format is: “GROUP (Composite) - ITEM”. That way you can always tell from the header view what your context and locale is.
