In my Chapter, each scene has a Title. How do I set things up so that a Scene Title is not the last line on a compiled page?
Suggest create two section types one for chapters and one for scenes. I have a compile format on the forum that does this. But each scene must have a title for that to work.
Where do I find it – Link, please
I’m not sure what angle the previous suggestion is going for, as (unless I am completely misunderstanding the question) this is more a matter of pagination and text flow control, rather than a higher level organisational tool that exists prior to the text being merged together. Or in other words, by the time we get to page flow matters, like keeping some text together with some other text that follows it rather than getting stuck alone at the bottom of the page, concepts like section types are long gone.
Overall this problem is not easily resolved in Scrivener (as many finalisation level page polishing is). There are some tools for doing this (like Keep With Next in the Format ▸ Paragraph submenu), but they aren’t available to compile settings.
So really the best thing you can do is prepare your output to best practices (stylesheets) so that your desktop publishing tool (or word processor if this is for something simpler) can better take over with minimal effort. To be clear I’m talking about putting in some effort up front, to establish a 10 to 30s processing overhead each time your compile, with a product that is going to be very close to finished. The result is something you’d want anyway most likely, as it will ensure the document has a good structure for inserting a dynamic ToC.
The basic theory is described in this post, which also links out to a few useful threads as well on this matter. This mainly focuses on LibreOffice, which I highly recommend as a companion to Scrivener, as it has a much more powerful stylesheet system that Word does.[1] Word is very dependent upon direct formatting to control page flow, whereas LibreOffice can go from a document that doesn’t even have page breaks in it, to something that lays out chapters on recto-only, keeps headings with their following paragraphs, creates two-page spreads for major parts, and so on. It’s a free tool, but I donate regularly.
While that goes more into theory, this post goes directly into the practical sort of adjustments you’d want to make to your compile Format to have well-styled headings. Note that where this post contains a short list of cross-references of further reading material, one of those has a sample compile Format with the styles already applied to the section layouts, and then goes through the steps done to create that format.
In particular to this matter, when modifying the heading styles in the template you will be importing your compiled material into, you will find a Keep with next paragraph setting in the Text Flow tab. ↩︎
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Thank you for your help
Thank you for your help – I already use LibreOffice, and I look forward to checking out your links.
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