uh-oh...page break before--where did that go?

Panic attack… In Scriv 3 is there still a way to do page breaks prior to compiles so that you can see something similar to a layout in page view, 2 pp across? (The way you could indicate page breaks in inspector, I mean.) This is fairly important when building a poetry ms. Otherwise I’m forced to print the whole thing out and move things around manually.

By default, scrivener will show a page break before folders. Or you can insert page breaks manually, of course, but that is not generally recommended.

Thanks. In Scriv 2, in the inspector, where you had the options for include in compile and compile as is, you also had a check box for page break before. This was for a document, not just for a folder. What happened to this, and is there a way to find this function now that you’ve changed things around? I see that there is a way to find the other two functions, but I can’t find page break before.

When I am building a poetry manuscript, I need to be able to set it to page view, two pages across. Then I need to have page breaks before each poem. Each poem is a document. I suppose I could have them all as sub-folders, but this is awkward. Instead I prefer folders for each section of the manuscript. Anyway, the page breaks enable me to me see how the manuscript will lay out–which poems will be facing each other. This is important as I figure out how the whole thing will flow and feel before I send it off to potential publishers.

The whole point of building a manuscript in Scrivener vs Word is the fluidity of Scrivener, and the lack of a need to a) cut and paste, and b) print out all the poems and move them around on my floor.

Scrivener 2 worked PERFECTLY for this. Did I move it to trash too soon? Should I have kept both versions to run them simultaneously…one for poetry and one for prose?

Scrivener 3 has opted for a more systemic way of handling page breaks. The old way, while easy to understand and okay for simple tasks, was, I guess, a bit ad hoc and unwieldy with larger, more complicated projects.

What you were doing had an admittedly simple and happy solution: Page View simply emulated your Page Setup settings by default but respected the Page Break Before Setting. Voila! But this dependency won’t work anymore. Instead, control of page breaks has become less direct. Documents are assigned to Section Types, and Compile Formats assign Types to Section Formats and the latter control page breaks.

The question is how to make use of the new way of doing things to get Page View to do what you want it to.

I know you can set Page Layout View to pay attention to your Compile settings (instead of your Page Setup settings) to some extent, but (not a Page View user myself) I am unsure if Page View will pick up on page breaks which are dictated by compile settings.

-gr

Thanks, GR. I found an answer! Kind of. It’s in Preferences>Appearance>Scrivenings. Then you can set page breaks before text documents in layout view.

But. It seems to insert random blank pages throughout the manuscript, even when I go back and make sure there are no odd blank lines/returns left and the file ends on the last period.

Not that helpful. I tried pulling Scriv 2.whatever (which also seemed to load this project faster) out of the trash, but now it says I don’t have a license.

I hope I can get this figured out, because as a novelist I used to see the poetry template and think, WHY would you use Scriv for poetry, and then I learned what a wonderful tool it actually was for poetry. It will be horrible if I can’t see manuscripts in it anymore.

Claudia,
Have you been able to resolve your issue with the random blank pages? I’ve having the same problem.

I’m also finding that while changing the appearance settings creates the proper page breaks in my draft (you know, aside from the random blank pages–though these do seem to appear after my poems that take up full pages, so maybe not totally random), when I compile the manuscript all my poems revert back getting squished together with no page breaks.

So so frustrated!

The Appearance settings only affect the way the project appears in the editor. To change the output document, you need to adjust the Compile settings.

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend looking at our upgrade guide for Scrivener 2 users, here:
literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-3-update-guide

Katherine

Do you know why we are getting random blank pages in our editors–2 page views in layout? It’s okay with me, and probably with others–if we change the settings in compile. The point is merely to see how it will flow (or close) in the manuscript form *as we are making our decisions about how to move individual documents (poems) around. A poetry manuscript is different from most other books, in that it takes quite a while to figure out what the best relationship of each piece is to each. Being able to use the page view, 2 across was invaluable in Scriv 2. Page breaks before was also essential so that each poem had its own page or several pages and they weren’t run together.

All of that wound up getting changed in compile or even in Word as I never did get Word to stop reading page break before as a section break, and always had to go through and change every one of those manually after compile anyhow. The point is the manuscript building phase.

I’ll read the guide, but now what we’re asking for is an explanation of and workaround for, these random blanks. (And yes , they do seem to occur following longer poems, so I wonder if, even though there is no hard return, for some reason the program has decided there would otherwise be a widow or something?) Thanks!

Tarae, maybe for the purposes of layout we need to delete a line or reduce the fonts? Just create a dummy draft to get eerything into position, but don’t forget to go back and fix everything prior to compile? Definitely not as cool as the old way.