Scrivener 3

Using Styles in Scrivener 3

October 12, 2018 By Gwen Hernandez 12 Comments

You would not want me to advise you on what to wear, but if you want to design a good-looking DOCX, PDF, or EPUB, I’m your girl.

And if you’ve ever wished Scrivener had Microsoft Word-like styles, get ready to rejoice, because Scrivener 3 has replaced the old Presets function—which offered formatting shortcuts without any memory—with Styles. *cue balloons and confetti*

Okay, great, but what exactly are styles?

Introducing Styles

Styles are memorized font and/or paragraph settings that act as a shortcut to quickly change the format of a section of text.

For example, if the characters in your novel often communicate via text message, you might want different font and paragraph formatting to denote the message text. Rather than format each instance manually, you could set up a style and then apply that style to the desired text with one click.

So far, that’s the same as the old presets. Here’s where it gets good.

There are two key benefits of the new Styles function.

You can update a style’s settings and it will automatically update all instances of that style throughout your manuscript.
Text formatted with a style can either be preserved or modified during the compile process. Your pick!

So, if the style you chose for your characters’ text messages looks great in PDF, but not so much in ebook, you can quickly change that style’s appearance in the Compile settings without modifying the original text or style.

I had a great analogy about jeans and T-shirts and high fashion—and a fabulous alternative analogy about Superman changing in a phone booth—but I’ll spare you.

Understanding When to Use Styles

Unlike Word, where a style is applied to every part of your manuscript, even the body text, Scrivener’s styles are meant for formatting exceptions.

The body text and chapter headings can be formatted when compiling, so you only have to style sections of text that need to look different from the rest of the document.

We already discussed using a style to denote text messages within a manuscript. Here are a few other examples of instances where you might want to use a style:

Email messages
Handwritten letters
News articles
Long quotes or epigraphs
Headings for subsections within a chapter or section document
Captions for figures and images

Creating a Style

If you find yourself wanting to apply the same format to portions of text throughout your manuscript, you can create your own style. Here’s how:

Select a portion of text and format it as desired, using the format bar at the top of the Editor.
With the text still selected, go to Format>Style>New Style From Selection.
Give the style a name that will make it easy to find again.
If you want this to be a character-only (saves only text attributes like font, color, size) or paragraph-only style (saves only paragraph attributes like line spacing, margins, indents), change the option in the Formatting dropdown menu.
Click OK. The new style is added to the Styles list in both the format bar and the Format>Style menu.

TIP: Styles you create are only added to the current project. However, you can import the stylesheet from another project via Format>Style>Import Styles. [Read more…]

Compiling a DOCX in Scrivener 3

July 13, 2018 By Gwen Hernandez 5 Comments

laptop on a desk in front of a window with a view of trees, with blog title written above — This is not my view.

Beyond a basic orientation to the software, what’s the number one thing people want help with in Scrivener?

Compile. No contest.

In April, I introduced Scrivener 3’s new approach to compiling (exporting) with a post about section types. Section types are foundational to the new compile feature, so if you need to bone up on the topic, I recommend you start there and then come back. (Or at least check it out later.)

Ready? In this second installment on compiling, I’m going to help you export your manuscript to a Word document, but the process is similar for other types of output.

Why might you want to compile to a DOCX file?

Submission to an agent or editor.
Submission to a contest.
To give your manuscript to a critique partner, friend, or beta reader.
To read through your manuscript and make notes.
Compatibility with Microsoft Word (duh), Apple Pages, and other word processors that will open or import DOCX files.

TIP: DOCX files are based on Rich Text Format (RTF), which is compatible across more word processors, and may do a better job of exporting images, lists, and tables than DOCX. RTF is also best when exporting for Apple Pages. If you’d prefer to create an RTF, choose Rich Text (.rtf) in step 2 of “Choosing Your Format” below.

Whatever your reason, you can create a lovely DOCX without too much fuss. I promise. Before you start, be sure you’ve set up your section types under Project>Project Settings>Section Types.

Choosing Your Format

The format determines what the final output will look like, including the margins, fonts, line spacing, first-line indents, chapter headings, scene dividers, and paper size. For this example, we’re going to choose a submission-style format.

Go to File>Compile (or click the Compile button on the toolbar). The Compile window opens.
From the Compile For dropdown at the top, choose Microsoft Word (.docx).
In the Formats column at the left, select Manuscript (Times). This format also works for other types of output, like RTF, Print, PDF (if not creating a paperback book), and HTML.

Adjusting the Look

If you’ve never assigned section layouts for this format, you’ll see a yellow box in the Section Layouts column (center) warning you about it. Even if you have, you’ll want to ensure they’re correct for the current project.

The following image shows common elements of a section layouts “tile” and what they represent. I selected this layout because it shows most of the possible elements, but this one would work best for those who do not use chapter folders, and have one document for each chapter.

To assign a section type to a section layout, do the following. [Read more…]

Scrivener 3’s New Approach to Compile

April 5, 2018 By Gwen Hernandez 12 Comments

In an attempt to make compiling (combining and exporting) your work in Scrivener 3 easier, you can now choose the final appearance of your manuscript based on a visual representation.

Whether you’re producing an ebook for an online retailer or sending out the first 50 pages of your manuscript to an agent, chances are you’ll have several sections that are formatted differently. For example, your title page, scene text, and back matter.

To successfully format your work, you’ll need to understand two new concepts: section types and section layouts. Section types are values you assign to files within your project that require the same format. Section layouts are the aforementioned visual representations of what those sections will look like.

Understanding Section Types

Section types might sound similar to styles, but styles are applied to a specific portion of text—often to differentiate it from the rest—while section types are assigned to an entire document or folder. For example, you might have a section type called Scenes that is assigned to the text documents that contain the actual scenes of the book. See how easy this naming thing is?

Another section type could be called Back Matter, and would apply to everything that comes after “The End.” If you’re using chapter folders, you’ll need a section type for those too, so you can specify whether the title is printed or just a chapter number, the font size, and so on.

You choose names that make sense to you and assign them to the desired files.

When you’re ready to compile, you tell Scrivener how each section type should be formatted by assigning a section layout to it. More on that later.

TIP: I find it helpful to have an “unformatted” section type to apply to files that stay exactly as they are displayed in the Editor. This is helpful for things like your title page and other front or back matter items with unusual typography or alignment.

Viewing Section Types

To view a project’s section types, go to Project>Project Settings>Section Types. What you see in the list varies depending on the template you chose when creating your project (and whether or not you’ve made changes).

Modifying Section Types

Before making changes to the existing section types, take a minute to think of the different formats you’ll need for your manuscript. Don’t worry, you can always modify them later.

To change the name of an existing section type, double-click it and type the new name.
To add a new section type, click the + button at the bottom of the pane.
Select a section type in the list and click the – button to delete it.

Assigning Section Types Automatically

You can automatically assign section types based on file type (e.g. document or folder) and hierarchy level (i.e. subdocument level in the Binder).

For example, you might assign All Files (i.e. text documents) to your Scenes section type by default. [Read more…]

New Year, New Scrivener

January 12, 2018 By Gwen Hernandez

Did you hear? Scrivener 3 for Mac released in November (Windows is in beta now and due out later this year), and the upgrade brings some cool new features.

Below are some of the tools (available for both Mac and PC) that I found most exciting while parsing through the changes for a free mini-course I created to help Scrivener 2 users transition to the new version.

Writing History

You’ve always been able to track your word count and progress in Scrivener, but if you wanted to keep a log of your daily word count, you had to manually enter it into a spreadsheet. By popular request, Scrivener 3 solves that with Writing History.

You can now view your word counts for each project by day, month, or day with monthly subtotals. Better yet, you can export the data to a CSV file for viewing in any spreadsheet program.

To access Writing History, go to Project>Writing History.

Styles

Scrivener users have been begging Literature & Latte for true, word-processor-like styles for as long as I can remember. Wish granted. With the old presets, Scrivener didn’t “remember” how a section of text came to be formatted—whether manually or via preset. You could apply a preset for quick formatting, but changing the appearance of, say, all email exchanges between your characters meant combing through the manuscript for every instance.

With styles, if you change the format of (i.e. redefine) a style, it updates all text formatted using that style throughout your manuscript.

You can also change how text formatted with a certain style appears when you compile.

I needed this recently for a manuscript that contained text messages between characters. I wanted the text formatted one way for ebooks and another for print. With the new styles function, problem solved. Slick, right?

Searchable Snapshots

Snapshots have always been a great way to keep versions of your scenes, but they had one flaw. You couldn’t search all snapshots at once. Let’s say you knew one of your early scenes mentioned a specific event that you’ve since written out of your manuscript. Now, you want to grab a conversation from that old scene, but after copious revisions you can’t remember which current scene it spawned.

Previously, you would’ve had to view the Snapshots for each possible scene and then you could run a search on the list using Command+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows).

No longer! To search all snapshots in a project for any word or phrase, go to Documents>Snapshots>Show Snapshots Manager. Type the desired text in the Search box and you’ll get a list of snapshots meeting the search criteria. Click any snapshot to view its contents.

Quick Search Bar

I didn’t even know I wanted this until I saw it. [Read more…]