I have trialled this program 3 times. over the last 6 months. (yes I edit registrys)
I have the basic gist of this hair tearing program.
I was told it had a steep learning curve. they werent wrong. its so steep it might as well be a vertical dry wall.
Honestly, the latest version of cubase is easier than this.
It seems my ideas are to antiquated for this software. I have a particular vision in mind for both print and epub and this scrivener does not accomodate it. Libre Office does. thats a peice of cake and lets me do things my way.
Iām not disclosing my ideas publicly. Jeez louise, could you simplify this software to add images to the chapters at least. Itās frustrated me so much I have uninstalled installed it and deleted registry entries for a third time. I hate this program, but it seems its the only one out there.
some force higher above give me strength before i throw my computer out the window.
If it wernt so difficult to use I would have paid for it, theres money waitingā¦
Iām the opposite. I am quite proficient in cubase, yet scrivener does my head in. There doesnāt seem to be any logic to it.
inserting artwork as title pages for a chapter.
Then the text follows as normal.
I have followed the help files both online and offline. I am left scratching my head and keep writing in Libre office, rendering to PDF is perfect, but scrivenerā¦ doesnāt make this easy at all.
Seriously scrivener is the most frustrating program I have ever used in 35 years of computing.
infact try 38 years of computingā¦ a young teenager using autocad 2.0 on a 286PC in 1987 with a real optical mouse doing a 3 view diagram of a B-17G then using a plotter to print it was easier. sorry this scrivener does not compute.
You might find it helpful to remember that Scrivener is not intended to be a page layout program. If you are up to the point where youāre worrying about chapter title pages, you may have already finished the tasks where Scrivener excels.
With that said, the easiest way to accomplish what you want is probably to put the title images in separate documents from the chapter body text, then insert a page break between the image document and the body document.
I think that anyone in this forum would like to help you. However, we need some specific difficulties. A frequent error is to believe that Scrivener is a text processor. The virtue of Scrivener lies in ordering and relating information distributed in text documents with a simple format.
Personally, I find it difficult to understand your point of view because, for me, Scrivener is quite intuitive even though I do not use it in my native language. There are programs dedicated to documentation that are difficult without a guide, but Scrivener only entails some difficulty in compilation; not in text edition.
In addition, a complete manual in PDF and multiple official tutorials and third parties are available on the internet.
Yes, some find this scrivener intuitive, i havenāt found it so.
People will find my POV hard to understand because I donāt want to elborate publicy on want I want to do.
I understand the basics, cover image back image wotnot. Epub3 ready to go, 4th time lucky with install and license.
What I have created looks like every other epub I have seen published. I would like to raise the bar a little. Perhaps expectations are set a little to high above the norm for whatās currently accepted.
I started a compile page to show how to do those things. Search compile format page. I have articles on compiling on my web site which include step by step to add images to chapters or scene using custom metadata placeholders. Start with my article on compile philosophy and look at other ones to see if will help. Agree compiling a little like learning calculus. It is Greek till the concept hits. Or look at this one about compiling images Blog 1 ā My Writing Journey
Thankyou, I will give your blog a good look over. So far from all the experimenting I have done, Scrivener->Epub format is far to restrictive for what I want to do. Even the text and page formatting to required standards for manuscript doesnāt translate well from libre office. I donāt use MS word any more because I had the same issue with that, it turned into a non intuitive program and gave me a headache.
It certainly is greek, I have been trialling this for three months and it hasnāt sunk in.
This forum is not exactly easy to poke around either.
Feel free to delete/anon account or what ever it is you do. BTW I wasnāt expecting it to replace desktop publishing software, i was expecting it to be able to create a book so who ever edited the titleā¦ your barking up the wrong treeā¦Scrivener is gone and so am Iā¦ seeya ā¦
That is how you make books, though. But letās say an amateur might contrive to make books with some other kind of software (yes, there are template glue-together kits like Vellum, which are very good at what they do, but you seem to have design ideas of your own). Even so, weāve always said, Scrivener is not a book making program, it is a program for writing the words that could go into a book (or a paper, whatever). Youād be spending your time more wisely learning LaTeX or Typst, which Scrivener has adequate front-end production support for.
Of course anything is going to seem impossible to learn if you approach it for the wrong reasons. A table saw has a āsteep learning curveā and disappointing results if you try to make bread with it.
I wouldnāt say one should be making books with LibreOffice either, though of all the word processors Iāve encountered, itās probably the closest to being decent for that. It makes for a very efficient companion with Scrivener.
What I have created looks like every other epub I have seen published. I would like to raise the bar a little. Perhaps expectations are set a little to high above the norm for whatās currently accepted.
The way of doing that is with CSS, but you can learn that with any tool that is used to make ePubs, Scrivener included.[1] Scrivener will help you construct the HTML framework without having to do that part by hand, but itās up to you to bring the design to it. I prefer to design in a tool like Sigil, where the CSS you write is exhibited in real-time in a preview to the right. Once Iām happy with it, I copy and paste the design into my compile Formatās CSS pane, and now it comes out that way when compiled.
Based on recommendations here, this has been exactly my workflow, can recommend, A++++ etc.
Although itās very possible to fix-after-the-fact, Iāve been Compiling to pandoc ā epub, opening in Sigil, tweaking the CSS, passing that back into the compile options, and repeating. āI want my titles to be formatted by CSS, how do I set up Scrivener to do this?ā and then lots of iteration on that.
No, itās not easy. I feel that not being tied to a specific output format is the price of that complexity. Nothing I do with my compile format precludes using any other format, notably when I move to making a paperback. I expect Iāll be in a similar loop then, when I start pouring the output into a page layout program.
