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PDF stands for portable data format One of the absolute strengths of Scrivener is the opportunity to output the same material to a number of alternative media - each one suiting a different audience's needs or preferences. One of the easiest formats to create, and the easiest to check, is the PDF. PDF is a paged format which - unlike .doc used in Word - doesn't rely on the page settings on...

Compiling is a straightforward process! Compiling is the final step in the self-publishing sequence. For many, it poses the greatest challenge - there are so many options, and the route to producing precisely what you want seems like a labyrinth at first sight. However, Scrivener offers so much in the way of default settings, you could produce something that's OKAY, without having to understand every nook and cranny of the options available...

Which styles are essential? Which styles you will need - your set of essential styles - depends on what you are writing: fiction or non-fiction, a script, and so on. Essential styles For any document, there are various types of material: Headings Text Special features The special features might be for tables (the title, column headings and entries), figures (captions), extracts (quotations) and so on. A designer (you, if you are self-publishing!) never knows, until...

To set up a new named style, click on the down arrow beside 'No Style' to reveal the drop-down menu and then click on Show Styles Panel. Clicking on the + sign in the bottom left corner of the Show Styles Pane and then completing the information requested will create an 'Editor style' (which is different from a Compile Style), and this new Editor style will apply to all your projects. All...

Building a style using named styles Within any 'style', there are building blocks. Scrivener offers a few named styles for starters. Click on the down arrow in the No Style box to reveal them. There are two main types (paragraph styles and character styles) and some are a combination of the two. This is explained in the Scrivener manual using this figure. Notice that, within each section, the named styles appear in alphabetical order....

My guest today is best-selling author, Toni Crowe. As a fellow student of the Self-Publishing School, Toni and I met through the SPS Facebook group, a melting pot of writers all keen to help each other along the publishing path. Toni has published six books to date and is a keen Scrivener user. Her latest is called Zero to Family Hero, an inspirational book, and it's now available on Amazon.co.uk and...

White space works One of the 'tricks' when presenting written material is to create the right amount of white space. White space, sometimes called negative space, is the portion of a page (or screen) left unmarked White space is controlled in two ways Spacing happens in one of two directions: horizontally, or vertically. Horizontal spacing: margins (between the text and the vertical edges of the page), indents (between the vertical margins and the text),...

Layout options galore Having acquired control over the font for your current project, the next important topic is the layout onscreen. How do you want your text to look in the Editing pane? (We'll discuss how it looks when you output to PDF, eBook or paperback in the series on Compile which follows this series of posts.) This is an example of how your novel may look, using Scrivenings, in the Editing pane. A...