Hello,
I have been using Scrivener for a month now and it is difficult to learn. I wrote a play in it (using their template) with pages breaks. It looks great in Scrivener but when I go to make a PDF version of it the writing is all over the place and not what is seen in Scrivener. Page break are also off.
Help! Oh, and does anyone know how to even number the pages? It does not seem automatic.
Thanks.
How did you “go make” the PDF? Compile? Using the Compile setting provided by the Scrivener template?
A good way to start to learn Scrivener is to review and pay attention to the Tutorial. You’ll learn there about how to avoid “writing all over the place” and how you can control Page Breaks.
Frankly, learning about Scrivener is a never-ending activity which is why I really like and use it. So far limit-less for me.
Welcome to one of the core design premises of Scrivener. It is not a word processor or a tool that even pretends to be one (though sadly, a lot of people do take it that way, due probably to not doing the tutorial along with the fact that it has a proliferation of formatting buttons by default). It approaches writing from a completely different stance, one closer to Markdown-oriented tools, where what one looks at while writing should have very little to do with what something looks like when completed, and that the sort of tools one uses to write with are very rarely any good for the publication and design, and vice versa.
I.e. you aren’t supposed to be printing out of Scrivener unless all you’re doing is proofreading. Since you’re writing a play, you probably want to be using something specialised for that purpose, more along the lines of Final Draft.
Or just compile instead of print? Just sayin’…
Yes, compile to FDX would be where I was going with that statement, which would preserve all of the formatting instructions and convey them accurately into an environment with piles of code dedicated toward layout. Either way though, you aren’t so much using Scrivener’s text editor to perform page layout directly.
I am going to guess that the OP was not using Scriptwriting mode, but was “formatting” their text manually (the prevalent use of manual page breaks is a clue) using some spacing/alignment strategies that confused the window width of the editor pane for the page width of the intended output. This is a recipe for things “going all over the place.”