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As explained in the Introduction to this series of posts, our focus is on one type of placeholder - tag words - and these are easily recognised.  They starts with <$  They end with > A floating window, listing all placeholders, available via the Help menu, provides all the information you need for each group of placeholders. It’s unfortunate that the order chosen for this list (as repeated below) might put you...

The word ‘placeholder’ has two interpretations in a Scrivener context. Loosely speaking, a placeholder is something which ‘holds a place’ until you, the writer, provides better information. More specifically, tag words are strings of code that act as placeholders and which will be assigned a value by the Scrivener software during compile . My focus in this series in on the tag words, but let’s deal with the more general interpretation...

This is the final post in this series, and now is the time to make any final tweaks to the decisions you've made so far in this book formatting journey. Your objective, up till now, has been to create the best product, one that your audience will enjoy reading. You put a lot of effort into choosing the right words, so you could 'tell your story' to best effect. The focus now,...

The previous five blogposts focused on the body of your book. DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: An Introduction DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Page Settings DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Body Text 1 DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Body Text 2 DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Headings, Headers and Footers In this post, we look at what goes before (FrontMatter which Scrivener puts in the Front Matter folder) and after (EndMatter...

This is the fifth in this series on DIY Book formatting. The previous four DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: An Introduction DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Page Settings DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Body Text 1 DIY Book Formatting with Scrivener: Body Text 2 covered most of the 20 items identified in the Introduction: all the ones in red below. The size of the page (width and height) The white space...

This is the second of two posts focusing on body text in this series on DIY Book formatting. In the previous blogpost, I looked at the basics of body text: point size, font style, leading and justification. In this follow-up post, I am considering four more aspects of body text formatting from our long list derived from studying a sample page of text. The paragraph style: indentation for the second paragraph,...

Pass me my glasses Body text design starts the ball rolling for many other design decisions. It's the majority of what your reader sees. In choosing the format for your body text, you need to consider these four settings. How big will the text be? This is called the point size. What font style do you plan to use? There are two main types: serif and sans serif. More on that...

Wrong shaped spoon? Adrian Frutiger says: If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. He explains: The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page...

Scrivener: the DIY publishing tool Formatting is a huge topic and I've written many blogs about it already. Formatting with Scrivener 3 Formatting with S3: All projects, this project, this document Formatting for printed output The Scrivener Mindset: Formatting via section layouts The Scrivener Mindset: Formatting via Compile The Scrivener Mindset: Formatting thru Section Layouts You might think, that's quite enough! No ...

Step 10 = Ask for feedback Once second-fix editing is complete, what happens next? Asking for feedback At various times in the writing/editing process, you might decide to seek feedback from others. In my RedPen Editing cycle, this is Step 10. Once second-fix editing is done, and you feel as happy as you can be with what you've produced, you might send your manuscript to a developmental editor for professional guidance. This will involve an...