This has been driving me crazy. I’ve got a novel split into sections. I’ve created my own format based on one of the manuscript formats, and I’ve been editing how the sections are formatted. Each section is separated with ‘#’.
However, I’ve got a few sections where I’ve inserted a different form of text (a transcribed interview, for instance), and I want to indent that and separate each entry with a blank line, and then to have the whole section (including the indented text) bracketed by a section break indicator (#). Like the following.
Normal section text.
Normal section text.
[blank line]
Indented text
[blank line]
Indented text
[blank line]
Normal section text.
Normal section text.
Does that make sense? However, I can’t seem to do it, for even if everything else works, the final # doesn’t appear.
I’m not sure what you have tried just yet, but the way I would approach something like this is to have a separate Section Type for these transcribed interviews, and then build a new Layout for them that doesn’t follow the same rules a layout would do for scenes.
An overall indent can be added in the Formatting Pane, once the text style is overridden.
The hash insertion can be disabled in the Separators pane for this layout, so that blank lines remain blank, by clearing the Blank line separator field.
The hashes at the prefix/suffix of the entire section could be handled in the Prefix/Suffix tabs of the Section Layout area for this layout, but it might be better to use Separators for this. You could set the Separator before sections and Override separator after fields to “#”.
I’ve attached a simple demo project that has a Section Type set up for interview text, and a modified compile Format based on “Manuscript (Times)”, that includes an “Indented Text” layout. interview_indentation_example.scriv.zip (85.4 KB)
Thanks so much for getting back to me, and for going to all that trouble.
The problem I have is that the interview portion is just part of a section (sometimes the first part, sometimes the last). So, for instance, imagine there’s a scene where a reporter is interviewing someone, and she says, “I’m just going to switch on the recorder”, and from that point on the dialogue takes place in interview format (e.g. P1: hello, P2: hello also, etc). So, I don’t actually want separators before and after the interview section, necessarily, just around the scene as a whole (although the interview part may come at the beginning or end of the scene, so may have a separator before or after it).
Does that make sense? My problem is I can get everything to look fine, but it leaves out the separators from around the scene as a whole, and I can’t figure out a way around it.
Okay, I think I understand better now—the interview needs to be contained within the confines of scenes (isn’t another kind of scene), and so should allow scenes to follow their normal rules for separation without interfering with them.
Hmm, that could be a little trickier, at least if you do use Section Layouts to denote interview text. It might ultimately be better to handle the entirety of these sections as styled text instead of breaking them out into their own binder items and employing Section Types on them.
The downside is minimal, and that is that styled text does not automatically adopt the formatting provided by the compile Format. For example if you prefer drafting in single-spaced but need double-spaced output, your interview text will remain single-spaced while the rest of the unstyled text is double-spaced. Like I say it’s a minimal problem however since each compile Format can individually override how a style should look, via the Styles compile option pane, and thus affect an appropriate look for the element based on the intent (you can see for example how we transform the way a block quote looks in the Manuscript Times format).
With the interview text how embedded in the scene as scene content rather than “not a scene” outline structure, the normal rules of where to place hashes are not disturbed.
I’ve updated the demo project to take this approach. Note how it uses sensible formatting aesthetics in the main editor, but these are then transformed to a more standard look for the manuscript output, in the Styles pane.
Also note how the behaviour works on the “empty line” style separator option, where if an empty line is styled, the hash won’t be automatically added. In this way we can space out bits of the interview (as demonstrated in the first sample) by keeping those empty lines using the “Interview Answer” paragraph style. interview_indentation_example.scriv.zip (78.7 KB)
That worked like a charm. Thank you so much! You won’t believe how crazy that’s been driving me. Or maybe you would! That was a bit of steep learning curve, and much more complicated than I’d hoped, but I’ve learned a lot.