Heya.
I’ve been using Scrivener for some time now. Written a couple of short-stories and just started to work with a novel. I’ve tried to write novels before, in Word, which didn’t end lucky (I didn’t end them at all…), and now I’m about to try again. When working in Word I tried to get each chapter about eight to twelve pages (A4) each, and thought that was a pretty good standard. Then I switched to Scrivener, and writing became at once much more fun. But there’s a little problem - I still want to have my chapters about ten pages, but since I cannot find how to watch the project in A4 it’s a bit frustrating. Is there any way to solve this?
Although you can track page counts per section by using Statistics (Shift-Opt-Cmd-S). In particular, you’ll probably be most interested in the Selection area (make sure to select the right chapter before calling it up), with sub-document counting on. You might already be set up for A4 in this counter, already, but you can check that by visiting File/Page Setup and selecting the appropriate paper size. The Statistics panel will use this setting for its counting procedure.
Since for my academic writing I need to be aware of page counts as well I simply did this: I figured out how many words I get on one page with the output format that I use. You can do that by pasting text into a scrivener document and look at the statistics as Ioa suggested. You can also do that by pasting text in your “other” word processor and look up wordcount there. I suggest to do that with more than one text segment to get a realistic average. And then you can multiply that number with your desired amount of pages and set the resulting number as your writing target for that chapter. That’s basically one of the reasons the target function was implemented.
