I am in the midst of production work for my next book, and this is the time I always learn new things about Scrivener. Here are some random bits of info. If this makes no sense to you, don’t worry; I’m mostly documenting this so that a year from now, I’ll google it again and find it here. BTW all of this is in the latest version on the Mac.
Using a Code character style in Kindle output
Need to have a monospace font code style that shows up in your final Kindle output?
- Surround your text with the HTML
<code>tag. Like this
- Select the text, and select Format > Formatting > Preserve Formatting. Your text gets surrounded by a little blue dotted outline.
- When you compile your book, under Compilation Options, select HTML Settings, and under HTML, select Treat “Preserve Formatting” blocks as raw HTML.
Making first paragraphs in a chapter or section not indented
- When compiling, under Compilation Options, select Formatting.
- This gets a little squirrely, because it depends on how you break up your documents/scrivs/folders. For this project, I had a scriv per chapter, and within them, I had blank lines for sections (where you’d normally have * * * or something in a print book.) In that situation, select the Section Type of Level 1+ with just one document (the bottom item).
- Click Options.
- Select Remove first paragraph indents and the relevant option. I used After empty lines and centered text, but yours might be something else.
- You might have to do this for different Section Type levels, depending on your structure.
My About the Author chapter is showing up as Chapter 32 in the Kindle TOC
- Make sure your scriv for the chapter has a properly-cased and human-readable title, like “About the Author” and not “WTF FFUUUCKCK FIX ME”.
- Under Compilation Options, go to Title Adjustments.
- There is a thing labeled Do not add title prefix or suffix to documents:. It has a little gear next to it. It’s not very OSX-ish and super easy to miss. Click the gear.
- Select the documents you want to not name “Chapter x”
- Click outside of this pop-up to close it, like on the dialog underneath it. (It has no close button. I told you it was a junky piece of UI.)
I imported a Scrivener-generated Word doc into Pages and when I try to have different head/foot/page numbers in a section, it freaks out and I think my computer is possessed by Satan
Scrivener probably put a page break instead of a section break between a couple of chapters, and now the Pages “use previous section” heading/footing setting behaves wrong. Change the page breaks to section breaks.
Also, if you don’t use section breaks between chapters and your chapters start on even pages of your book, stop doing that.
The spell check isn’t catching things
That’s because it sucks. You might want to check your spelling and grammar in another program.
Hope these help someone, or at least help me in six months when I do this again.