Vellum and Scrivener Settings

[Douglas]

I’ve been trying out the demo version of Vellum.

I compiled a 30,000 word manuscript as a test with Scrivener 3, using a Microsoft Word Document format along with Scrivener’s Vellum profile settings.

In Vellum, between every one of my paragraphs I have a weird character that Vellum support calls an Ornamental Break and there’s no way to get rid of them in Vellum except to go through 30,000 words and manually delete them.

I wrote to Vellum support and they blame my Scrivener setup. I’m not doing anthing fancy and I’m using the standard fiction template supplied by Scrivener.

… and why would Scrivener’s standard ficiton template treat empty lines between paragraphs as scene breaks by default?

Here’s what they said:

By default, Scrivener treats empty lines between paragraphs as scene breaks, and these are imported into Vellum as Ornamental Breaks.

To resolve this, you’ll want to return to your manuscript and remove any empty lines between paragraphs that are not intended to be scene breaks. After you make that change, you can reimport into Vellum, and you should see continuous paragraphs.

What am I doing wrong and there’s got to be a simpler way of compiling for Vellum to get rid of the Ornamental Breaks in the exported manuscript, other than manually deleting empty lines in my source Scrivener manuscript?

Thanks.

Regards,
Doug

[kewms]

Edit -> Text Tidying -> Remove Empty Lines Between Paragraphs.

It’s not accurate to say that Scrivener is treating empty lines as scene breaks, though. It’s just passing through the formatting you gave it.

Katherine

[Douglas]

Thanks.

So, knowing the compile option selected is for Vellum, why would Scrivener not automatically do this when compiling, or at least provide a compile option for the user to select it?

Regards,
Doug

[Douglas]

I received another email from Vellum support.

For best results you will want to remove empty paragraphs that are not intended to be scene breaks, but that’s not something you have to do manually.

Instead, you can make use of Find/Replace tools. Here’s one article that discusses how to do this in Scrivener:

gwenhernandez.com/2013/03/12/te … scrivener/

Should I be changing Scrivener’s default settings as per the article they refer to?

Regards,
Doug

[kewms]

That article predates both the release of Scrivener 3 and the introduction of Vellum.

As I said, you can clean these up in the original manuscript with the Edit -> Text Tidying -> Remove Empty Lines Between Paragraphs command.

Why doesn’t the Compile command do this? How is Compile supposed to know which extra lines are spurious and which ones are intended to create scene breaks?

Katherine

[Douglas]

I’ve got comfortable writing my book with Scrivener hitting the enter key twice at the end of each paragraph. That was the default for your fiction template I started with and have got used to edting and reading my work with that spacing.

When I use Scrivener’s compile for anything except Vellum’s compile settings, the resultant output seems fine, ie: ePub, Mobi etc.

If I wanted to change Scrivener to be compatible with Vellum’s needs, should I follow their instrucions and change it within Scrivener as they suggest?

By the way, a follow up from Vellum.

That article was originally posted in 2013, but was later updated in 2017. You should find that, for the most part, the screenshots match what you see in current versions of Scrivener. There are of course many other articles about how to do this. We included this one as an example because it’s pretty thorough, and because it also includes some advice for how to avoid this problem with future manuscripts. It doesn’t mention Vellum, but avoiding empty lines between paragraphs is considered a best practice regardless of how you format your book.

In any case, we hope that you were able to use this or another article to replace your extra paragraph breaks all at once rather than doing so manually.

Thanks…

Rergards,
Doug

[kewms]

As their note says, avoiding empty lines between paragraphs is probably the best way to avoid the problem.

If you’d rather not do that then, again, Scrivener has a command to strip them in the Editor.

Katherine

[lunk]

@Douglas

I’ve got comfortable writing my book with Scrivener hitting the enter key twice at the end of each paragraph.

An easier way is to set Paragraph spacing to a distance that fits your writing.