We have the widows and orphans system in the Scrivener 3.2.3.
I am finding that if I compile a single chapter, the proper widow and orphan settings are respected but if I compile the entire document they are not.
The screen shots which I can’t upload but am happy to send, show the first 2 pages of the exact same chapter, with exact same compile settings only one (correct version) had half the book selected and the wrong one had the whole book selected.
Without looking at the project directly, it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on. But I’ve seen other projects in which using paragraph breaks, page breaks, and other white space characters to manipulate the page layout directly in the Editor caused strange widow/orphan behavior.
There are also some known issues with the PDF converter’s widow/orphan handling, but I’d look at the document formatting first before blaming the converter.
Katherine
Hi Katherine.
The strange thing is that the widow/orphan handling of the first page of one chapter is different depending on whether I compile that Chapter on its own or if I combine the whole document.
A chapter starts on a new page and the next chapter starts on a new page, so there should not be any difference to the layout out if I compile other chapters at the same time.
Now I found that a final paragraph break was missing at the end of the chapter. Adding that in solved the problem.
You are correct, there shouldn’t be a difference between compiling one chapter and compiling the whole manuscript. If there is then something about the text or settings is causing the difference. In this case, the missing paragraph break is irrelevant if it’s the last character of the document, but very relevant if it falls between chapters.
Do you mean last in the project?
No, I mean the last character of the document being compiled. See the post I was replying to: the missing paragraph break only mattered when multiple chapters were compiled.
Last character in the compile, then. Document means one Scrivener section to me.
If the last character in the Scrivener document is also the last character in the compiled output document, then it’s irrelevant. If the last character in the Scrivener document falls somewhere in the middle of the compiled output document, then it matters.
Yes, I agree that “document” is badly overloaded in this context.
That’s why I try not to use it for anything else.
Many words are massively overloaded in Scrivener. That’s why I don’t recommend the manual much or blame anyone for not finding things there.