Thanks very much to the author of the Interactive Tutorial in Scriver 3 (Windows version). It’s very useful, and quite clear. After working through it i was able to start using Scrivener 3 after not having touched Scrivener 1 for a few years, so while I’m not a total newbie, I was rusty enough that I felt as if I was starting for the first time. So, well done! The Interactive Tutorial accomplished it’s objective, and I’m grateful.
I have started writing something in Scrivener 3 as a way to learn the software, and to start practicing writing. This was why I bought Scrivener way back in 2016 or 2017 in the first place, but life had some other plans for me until now. I just wasn’t able to get myself together enough to actually use it. I must say that I feel that I am enjoying using Scrivener 3 quite a bit more than Scrivener 1, for some reason. Is that fair comment? It’s been so long and so much has happened for me that I can’t quite remember the Scrivener 1 interface too well. But Scrivener seems easier (to me) now than it did, and I’m grateful for that, too.
I do have a question, though, and looking back through the forum posts I see that I and a few others have had the same question before. I would like to be able to produce a PDF with the headings and sub-headings as bookmarks. I see Scrivener publishes to epub that way, but it would help me a lot if I could do that with PDF without having to publish to MS Word or ODT and then to PDF, so if there is an easy to do it directly in Scrivener, I would appreciate it somebody could point me in the right direction.
Unfortunately that capability isn’t something we could get figured out for the Windows version. The PDF writer that is used doesn’t have any easy way of providing a sidebar ToC. The other big missing navigational ingredient is internal cross-reference links.
Both are on the list for investigation, but like I say it’s going to be tough without the framework to even get into the PDF generation at that level.
I would say if you need a PDF with navigation, the best result will be to compile to RTF and then assemble the final PDF from a word processor. LibreOffice has a pretty good PDF generator, for instance.
That aside: thanks for the kind words! Glad to hear you’re enjoying the upgrade and finding it to be a productive tool as you learn the writing process itself.
OK, thank you. I see Scrivener doesn’t compile to ODT with heading styles; Folders become a normal text style despite being formatted differently (e.g. bold and large). But I installed MultimarkDown and MikTex and I’m playing with the options with various degrees of success. I will keep playing with it until I crack it.
Hmm, that should be working. Here is a sample project which accompanies a detailed howto on the method. Give that a spin and see if it works. I tried both native RTF and converted ODT. With that I inserted a table of contents and it came up as expected, with chapters and subsections.
That said, Markdown is a natural way to get structured documents, whether by ODT or LaTeX.
Ah, thank you so much! That helped me to see what was different in my format and layout. I had assumed there would be predefined heading styles for the built-in compile to ODT format, and there weren’t any. Using the example you sent me, I could see how to set it up, and then it worked perfectly. Awesome! I’m grateful.