That is the File/Compile… command. If you’ve been looking at it from a standard word processor perspective, then you won’t find anything like that. The editing environment in Scrivener is intentionally divorced from the production components, so you can, for example, type in 16pt Arial all day even though you’d rarely ever use that for print. Again, not too dissimilar from advanced stylesheet usage in something like Word, but different.
While the primary purpose of Compile is to of course turn an arbitrary number of fragments into a single document, in doing so, it can handle a variable amount of structure and design for that document. At its most basic, the “Original” preset, it functions mostly as a pass-through, but what you’d be more interested in is the Formatting pane. Click the blue up-arrow to view all options, and within that section you’ll find the ability to override the source text formatting, generate structural headings, handle automatic numbering and other things of this nature. As with Word’s outliner-based stylesheets, it is capable of producing multi-level formats (so level one folders could function as major sections, level two as subsections, and so forth). One of the major differences between our system and a traditional word processor is that outliner levels can dictate all formatting—not just the headings (I’d say another major difference is that our system lets you write “off the record”, leaving content in certain sections of the hierarchy out of the output—i.e. one can outline deeper than what should be visible to the end reader). There are some interesting implications there—some people use document depth specifically to implement fluid formatting designs—if all of your block quotes are level 3 text, you can style them independently from the body text on levels 1 & 2. They can be indented for one preset, or set as green sans serif text for HTML output, etc. It’s a big component of the software, definitely more advanced, but if you want to design outputs for documents—that’s your tool.
Without learning too much about it or digging into the options, you could briefly test it by throwing some sample content together and then compiling RTFs using different “Format As” presets. You’ll see from that that you can control quite a bit about the design of the document. The interactive tutorial in fact goes over this in its compile introduction. One of the first things it has you do is compile the tutorial with different presets to see how you can use the software in a more WYSIWYG fashion, vs. a fluid “stylesheet” fashion.
You are correct in that there is no way to resize the icons. They are raster images, not vector, so to allow for a larger size we would have to hand draw an entirely new set at a different size. However the high-res monitor issue is something specifically not fully supported at the moment, which is why you’re probably seeing things far smaller than they should be. That is something we definitely intend to fix. I think there is a Windows setting that will blow up UI rasters. The result is fuzzy, but at least not microscopic, right? I wish I knew the trick off-hand; it was just something I happened across when playing with a Lenova Yoga2 at a store.
At the moment it sounds like you’re using the program in the least visually appealing configuration (though I understand why, text just looks so nice on those high-res screens!), mainly because we’re still halfway in the middle of high-res adoption (a lot of the hold-up is the coding toolkit, Qt). Having high-res icon sets and more acceptable text layout at varying UI sizes is the goal, though. Check around on the forum, there are a few threads with tips for tweaking the settings to work better with Scrivener.
With one trivial correction to terminology, yes. It’s not the template that controls this, but the compile settings (and the presets that one uses or creates). Templates in Scrivener are more like starting points, or elaborate boilerplates. After their creation, everything about them can be changed. They do nothing you cannot do yourself, and starting with one (or not) doesn’t lock you into any particular approach. At the project creation stage, everything is malleable. In that sense, there isn’t a direct analogy to DOT files in Scrivener.
We’re still a little ways from what I would consider a solid solution for technical documents with fluid output requirements, but we’re working toward that!
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So let me rephrase that: Styles will be in the next major iteration of Scrivener, which will probably be developed and released some time this decade, although we cannot confirm whether any development has yet begun or say what other features may or may not go into this putative future version. Terms and conditions may apply.