Two weeks of 6-7 hour days down the drain, I’m ready to quit and never use Scrivener again to compile books. I’d use Vellum exclusively forever if they had K8, but they don’t. I only upgraded to 3 because I wanted the K8 Kindle Page Flip formatting that no one else has.
I read another thread (Nov 2017-ish “Help with new compile formats”) where AmberV went through a very detailed process for setting up section layouts in the project settings menu then how to mod those in compile.
However, her screen caps in Project Settings do NOT match mine at. all. Can someone please help me set this up the way it should be?
“To open the format designer you will either need to create a new format (subsection 23.2.3), possibly duplicating an existing one, or edit a custom format you’ve made or imported in the past by double-clicking on it in the Formats list. You will be greeted by the compile format designer window.”
In other words, you ought not to be in Project Settings, but File>Compile, then follow the instructions above.
Except that AmberV startedted[/i] her process for setting up the compile formatting. I have these two weird types and she gets section header, and all these more familiar sounding things in the project settings.
This is what I’m talking about because if the project settings aren’t correct, the compile formatting changes don’t work (trust me this is where I’m at. The User Guide/Manual in that section literally doesn’t apply until those are fixed. I can’t fix them. I need to know how.
You can use the +/- buttons in the Project Settings window to create or remove new section types as needed.
They don’t have to match whatever Amber used, just use whatever makes sense to you for how you want you final document to be structured. You’ll define how they actually look in the compiler
This area of project settings you are working in is freeform, you can set it up how you need it to be set up, and the described buttons are how to do so. If you’d like a little more theory on the topic in order to make good decisions:
Section Types are introduced in §7.6 of the user manual, starting on page 128. That goes purely over the project/binder angle, not really getting into compile at all.
Appendix C.2, pg. 813, is where the Project Settings panel itself is fully documented.
It’s worth noting the yellow call-out at the top of the first reference: “Shouldn’t the software do this for me?”. It looks like you’ve started from a blank project template—and that is fine and good, but it might be helpful to create for yourself a test project from one of the novel templates, purely to poke around in its settings and see how it is set up—note you can even export Section Type settings from these examples and import them into your WIP, too. But you might find it more useful to simply copy those ideas from them that make sense to you for this project.
At this phase, keep in mind this important dichotomy:
Section types are where you establish the structure of your work. This is a scene—it should print like one and do all of the things a scene should; this is a chapter, and so forth. These statements do not say anything about how they print—with separators, etc.
Layouts, on the compile side, are all about how this structure should print. Then we are talking about what a separator should look like, and where they get inserted, or what font size to use for chapter headings.
