Quick Start Note: If you are only going through the “Quick Start” notes and are

eager to get up and running, you might want to skip this section and come back
to it later, as this is quite a long section. It is a very important section, though, as
it covers how to compile the contents of your Draft folder into a single text for
exporting and printing. So if you don’t want to read this now, be sure to come
back and read it before you need to export or print your work.

Scrivener’s purpose is to provide a sort of writer’s studio; a place where you throw
everything, all of your research, ideas and scribblings, with the aim of mashing it
together into a draft which you can then either print for posting off to a publisher,
or export, whether to another program for tweaking or to an e-book format for
self-publishing. This is where Scrivener’s Compile feature comes in.
The Compile feature takes everything that is in the Draft folder and generates
a single, formatted document from it. You have complete control over the output—
you can choose from various file formats (or print directly from Scrivener), you
can choose whether to include document titles (or synopses and notes for that
matter), set up a header and footer, and even completely change the font and
paragraph formatting if you so desire—so there’s no need to write in the same font
you use for printing and exporting unless you want to.
“Compile…” can be found at the bottom of the File menu. Try selecting it
now, but then click “Cancel” and come back here.
At first glance, it probably doesn’t look like much. This is because it is set up
by default to show only the most basic options—you can choose a preset from the
“Format As” pop-up button and a file format from the “Compile For” button, then
click on “Compile” to create a basic document containing the merged contents of
your Draft folder.
Let’s try that now—we’ll generate a PDF preview of the draft of this tutorial
project:
1. Go to File > Compile…
2. Ensure that “Original” is chosen for the “Format As” setting.
3. Ensure “PDF (.pdf)” is selected next to “Compile For”.
4. Click on “Compile”.
5. Enter a destination and file name for the PDF and click Save.
6. Open the PDF produced by Scrivener.
You can choose from one of the other “Format As” presets to format your
draft differently. For instance, try compiling again, just as you did above, but this
time choose “Standard Manuscript Format” (be sure you choose “PDF (.pdf)”
from the “Compile For” list again, as changing the “Format As” option can affect
the selected file format). This time, you will find that the draft has been compiled
using a Courier 12-point font with double line-spacing.
Tip on Formatting
Most of the presets in the “Format As” menu will apply different
formatting to your manuscript—different fonts, different page settings,
titles, separators and so on. If you find yourself getting frustrated when
trying to tweak the Compile settings, or if you want to start from scratch,
it is often a good idea to select “Original” and start from there. “Original”
is set up so as not to override any of the formatting—the exported or
printed manuscript will look just like the text in the main editor. You can
then work through the Compile options, setting them up as required.

That’s all you need to know for creating basic print-outs and exported files
from your draft. At some point, though, you may find that you want more control
over the document that gets produced. Try going back to the Compile dialog and
clicking on the expansion arrow:

The Compile dialog will expand to show a whole raft of options. You don’t
really need to worry too much about all of these settings at the moment—the main
thing to know is just that this is where you come to export or print your entire
manuscript, and that the Compile settings provide complete control over how your
manuscript will be formatted should you need it.
Let’s try a quick custom compile though (you may want to open up one of
the PDFs you compiled and jump to this section so you can follow along without
switching in and out of the compile window). This time, with the compile dialog
expanded to show all of the advanced options, try the following:
1. Choose “Original” from the “Format As” list again.
2. Take a look at the “Contents” pane. This allows you to choose which
documents get compiled. The drop-down menu at the top, which currently
says “Draft”, can be used to choose only a subfolder of the Draft (so that
you could compile and print only a single chapter, for instance) or to
choose the Quick Start collection or one of the collections we created in
Part 13 (so you can compile only the documents that appear in a particular
collection or search results). You can uncheck the “Include” button for any
document you don’t want included in your compiled document. You can
thus fine-tune which documents go into your final manuscript.
 All we’re going to do is click on the pop-up button at the top that currently
says “Draft”, and choose “Part 1: Basics”—that is, we are only going to
compile the “Part 1” folder.

3. Now, from the list of settings on the left, choose “Separators”. This section
allows us to choose how our documents should get stitched together—
whether we should put page breaks between the different components or
just line breaks and so forth. (Note: you can also insert page breaks
between documents by selecting “Page break before” for individual
documents in the “Contents” pane or the main editor inspector. That is
usually best used as a last resort, however—it’s generally better to set up
page breaks in “Separators” if possible.)
a. For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”.
b. For the “Folder and text separator”, choose “Single return”. This will
ensure that the text of any documents following a folder will be
added straight after the folder title—which we will now set up in our
formatting options.
4. Click on “Formatting”. This is the part of the Compile sheet that allows
you to choose how your text looks—what font it uses and suchlike. At the
top is a list with a folder, text group and text document in it, each saying
“Level 1+” next to them (text groups are just text documents that have
other text documents grouped inside them—have a look at “Step 5: The
Inspector” to see an example of one). Each document type can be
formatted separately.
5. At the top of this pane you will see a checkbox labelled “Override text and
notes formatting”. It is unchecked at the moment, which means that the
text (and notes should you choose to include them) of each document will
appear in your compiled manuscript exactly as they do in the editor, just as
they did the first time you compiled. We’re going to override the
formatting, though, so click on this button to tick it.
6. Click on the top item in the “Type” list, the “Level+” row with the folder
icon in it. Note that each row has tick boxes for “Title”, “Meta-Data”,
“Synopsis”, “Notes” and “Text”. These tick boxes determine which parts
of the document will get included in your text. So at the moment, only the
text of folder documents, text groups and text documents will be included,
because only the “Text” button is ticked for each. Let’s change this. Click
on the “Text” button in the folder row to remove “Text” and then tick the
“Title” button instead. Note how the text in the bottom pane has changed
to show the word “Title” in bold. This bottom text area gives you a
preview of what the document will look like, so in this case it shows us
what folder documents will look like when exported or printed—they will
show only their titles, in bold text.
a. Click into the bold “Title” text. Note how the ruler and formatting
bar become active when you do so. Click on the centred text button,
and click on the “A” button to choose a different font. Make the font
big.
b. Above the formatting bar, click on the “Page padding” stepper
control to change the page padding to “8 lines”. This will add eight
lines of blank space before the documents of the folder type
whenever they start on a new page. (You’ll see what I mean in a
minute, they won’t show up in the preview area.)
7. Now, click on the next row, the one with a text group icon (the middle
choice), and tick the “Title” checkbox. Leave the “Text” checkbox ticked
for this one, though. The text area at the bottom will be updated to reflect
your changes.
a. Click in the bold title in the preview area. Get rid of the bold and
change it to underlined and italicised instead using the format bar,
 and change its colour to blue using the colour control (right-click on
the ‘A’ button on the right side of the format bar, next to the
highlighter pen to see a palette with colour choices in it).
b. Click into the main text area and change the formatting to whatever
you want—use the “A” button to change the font, the ruler to change
the paragraph indenting, and the line spacing control in the format
bar to change (who’d have thought it) the line spacing.
8. Click on the last row, the text icon with “Level 1+” next to it, and do the
same again, but this time choose a different format for the title and text.
9. Right, at last, click on the “Compile For” drop down and select “Preview”.
Then click “Compile” to open a preview.
Take a look through the preview document to see what you’ve done—you’ve
added titles and completely changed the way the text looks. Once you’re happy
with that, click the “Close” button to return to the Compile dialogue. We’re just
going to make one tweak, as follows:
1. Choose the “Formatting” pane again.
2. Select the third row, the “Level 1+” with the single text icon next to it.
3. Click on the “Add formatting level” button:

A “Level 2+” row will appear, slightly indented below the “Level 1” text
row. The “Level 1” row will no longer have the plus sign after it, either.
I’ll explain what this means in a moment. If you click between the “Level
1” and “Level 2+” rows, you will see that the formatting in the text area at
the bottom is the same for each—that’s because the new formatting level
is created using the same formatting as the selected row by default.
4. Click on the “Add formatting level” button again so that a “Level 3+” row
is created.
5. With the “Level 3+” row is selected, click into the text area and change
formatting to something glaring. Change the text colour to bright green or
suchlike.
6. Click on the “Compile” button again and once more view the results in
Preview mode, this time looking out for the green or lurid text formatting
you added.
What just happened?
What you should have seen is that all documents contained inside the “Step 5: The
Inspector” group came out using your lurid formatting, but everything else stayed
the same as the previous compile. Why? Because you can set up the formatting on
a per-document-level basis if you like, and that’s what we just did. If you look at
the binder, the folders “Part 1: Basics” and so on are all contained in the Draft
folder at the first level—that is, they are one level deep in the Draft folder. If you
then look at “Step 1”, “Step 2” and so on, these are two levels deep in the Draft
folder, because they are contained inside the “Part 1” folder which itself is
contained in the Draft folder. “5a: The Synopsis Index Card” and the other
documents grouped inside the “Step 5: The Inspector” document are on the third
level. And so it was only these documents that were affected by our “Level 3+”
formatting settings. Incidentally, the “+” indicates that this is the last level we have
set up formatting options for, and so it will be applied to any levels of document in
the Draft that go deeper (so if we’ve only set up two formatting levels, documents
three or four deep in the binder will receive the same formatting as those at two
levels deep).

Quick Start Note: If you’re viewing the “Quick Start” collection in the binder,
you’ll need to switch to the full binder to see the documents at their different
levels inside the Draft folder. Click the “Binder” tab to see this, then click back
on the “Quick Start” tab to return to viewing the collection.

Okay, onto the next section. Expand the “Part 4” folder and click on “Step
17: Split and Merge” (or go straight to Step 23 if you are only going through the
“Quick Start” sections).