That is how you make books, though. But let’s 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, we’ve 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). You’d 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 “steep learning curve” and disappointing results if you try to make bread with it.
I wouldn’t say one should be making books with LibreOffice either, though of all the word processors I’ve encountered, it’s 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 what’s 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 it’s 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 I’m happy with it, I copy and paste the design into my compile Format’s CSS pane, and now it comes out that way when compiled.
In fact, that it does automatically generate very basic CSS from GUI-derived formatting choices in the Styles and Section Layouts pane, and from various checkboxes, it can make for a very good learn-as-you-tinker program. One could learn how to indent paragraphs, or remove indenting where they don’t want it, for example, or the best practices for changing the amount of spacing around headings. ↩︎