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 headers and footers, 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, modify a
few basic options, change the font if you so wish, and 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 next to “Format As” (this
is the default setting, and exports all of the text in your draft as it
appears in Scrivener).
3) Ensure “Print” is selected next to “Compile For”.
4) Click on “Compile”.
5) The print preview pane will appear. You could click on
“Print” to print your manuscript, but we want to see it as a PDF.
So instead, click on the “PDF” button in the bottom-left of the
panel and select “Open PDF in Preview” (note that you can
choose “Save as PDF…” to save a PDF document to disk, which
does exactly the same as choosing “PDF” from the “Compile For”
menu).

Preview will open to show you the entire contents of the Draft
folder combined into one long document… It seems I wrote a lot.

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” format (be sure you choose “Print” 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: 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.

The other most important options in this area are “Add front
matter” and “Font”. “Add front matter” allows you to choose a
document, or a folder of documents, in the binder that should be
used to provide front matter for your manuscript (title page,
contents page, dedication and so on). You could just insert the
title page and other front matter at the top of the Draft folder and
not worry about this option. The benefit of using this setting,
though, is that it makes it easy to switch between different sets
of front matter for different formats: while your body text will
always stay the same, you may want different front matter
depending on whether you are submitting to an editor using
standard manuscript format, self-publishing, or creating an e-
book.
The “font” setting allows you to change the font for
everything in the manuscript to a particular font face. This is just
a quick and easy way of changing the font - much more control is
available, as we’ll see (this setting the same as “Quick Font
Override” - see the yellow tip box below for more information).

That’s all you need to know for creating basic print-outs and
exported files from your draft. You may have noticed, though,
that the options we have currently been looking at are all inside
the “Summary” tab of the Compile panel. It’s called the
“Summary” tab because it just shows a few of the most
commonly-used options, and allows you to make quick changes
to existing formats. At some point, however, you may find that
you want more control over the document being produced—at
which time you’ll want to play with the full range of options
available. Let’s look at them now. Try going back to the Compile
sheet and clicking on “All Options”:

The Compile sheet 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 wish to
open this document in a QuickReference window, by clicking on
the “QuickRef” panel in the toolbar, so that you can refer to it
easily while the Compile sheet is open.) This time, with the
compile sheet expanded to show all of the advanced options, try
the following:

1) Choose “Original” from the “Format As” list again, to reset

the formatting.
2) Take a look at the “Contents” pane. This allows you to
choose which documents get compiled. The pop-up button 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 one of the collections
we created in Part 2 (so you can compile only the documents that
appear in a particular collection). You can uncheck the “Include”
button for any document you don’t want included in your
compiled document, and there are some filter options at the
bottom of this pane, too. 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.)
4) For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”.
5) 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.
6) 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.
7) At the top of this pane you will see a button entitled
“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 using the “Original” setting. We’re
going to override the formatting, though, so click on this button
to tick it. You’ll see that the text in the blue text area at the
bottom turns black - it was grey before to indicate that its format
wasn’t being overridden.
8) 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 be 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.
9) 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.
10) 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 at the top of folder documents
whenever they start on a new page. (You’ll see what I mean in a
minute.)
11) Next, click on the text group row (the middle one), and
tick the “Title” button. Leave the “Text” button ticked for this one,
though. The blue text area at the bottom will be updated to
reflect your changes.
12) Click in the bold title in the blue text 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
(hold down on the black rectangle next to the yellow one for a
second to see a palette with colour choices in it - this will allow
you to change the colour).
13) 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.
14) Click on the last row, the text icon with “Level 1+” next
to it, and do the same again, but this time choosing a different
format for the title and text.
15) Right, at last, click on “Compile” and open a PDF preview
in Preview.app again.

Take a look through the PDF document to see what you’ve

done - you’ve added titles and completely changed the way the
text looks.

TIP: The “Formatting” pane gives you complete control over the
fonts, indents, line spacing and other paragraph styling that the
various elements of your compiled document will use. If all you
want to do is change the font face, however, you can use the
“Quick Font Override” pane instead. This allows you to change
the font used throughout the compiled document without
having to worry about all of the other settings. It’s mainly useful
for making a quick change to an existing compile format. For
example, suppose you select the “Standard Manuscript Format”
preset from the “Format As” menu. As noted above, this is set
up to compile your manuscript using a Courier 12pt font and
double-line spacing, using Courier headers and footers too.
What if you want to print or export using this exact manuscript
format, except that you want to use Times New Roman or Arial
instead of Courier? In this case, all the settings are just as you
want them except for the font face. You could go through the
“Formatting” pane and change the fonts for all the various
elements there, and change the font used for headers and
footers in the “Page Settings” pane too. But if all you want to do
is change the font face, then it’s much easier to use “Quick Font
Override” for this instead. In that pane, simply tick “Override all
fonts with face” and choose the font face you want to use, and
you’re done.
 Once you’re happy with the PDF file you’ve created, return to
Scrivener and select “Compile” again - you can just click on the
button in the toolbar to save going through the File menu. We’re
going to make another tweak, as follows:

1) Choose the “Formatting” pane again.

2) Select the third row, the “Level 1+” with the single text
icon next it.
3) Click on the “Add formatting level” button next to the
“Options…” 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) Make sure the “Level 3+” row is selected and then click
into the blue 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, 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).

Right, one final tweak. Because this is a tutorial project, I

have numbered all the documents in the binder - “Part 1: Basics”,
“Step 3: Footer View”, and so on. You wouldn’t normally do this.
Instead, you would just give documents meaningful titles and let
Compile handle the numbering for you using the auto-numbering
tags available from Edit > Insert > Auto-Number. To see what I
mean, let’s go back to the “Formatting” pane of Compile once
again and do the following:

1) Click on the “Level 1+” folder item at the top of the list.
2) Click on “Section Layout…”.
3) In the “Title Prefix and Suffix” tab, enter “Chapter <$t>”
followed by a single return in the “Prefix” box, then click “OK”.
4) You will see that “Chapter One” now appears at the top of
the preview area - “<$t>” is the tag for title-case numbering. You
can format this the same way as you do anything else, by clicking
into the text and using the format strip to change the font,
spacing, alignment and suchlike.
5) Click on “Compile” and once again check the results in
Preview. Note how “Part 1: Basics” now has “Chapter One” above
it.
6) Back in the “Formatting” pane of Compile, untick “Title”
for the “Level 1+” folder icon, compile, and open in Preview
again.

Note how the prefix can be used on its own - now it just says
“Chapter One” at the top of the document. Chapter numbers are
added to the novel template and other templates that come with
Scrivener in exactly the same way. A complete list of tags that
can be used with Compile is available by going to the Help menu
and selecting “Placeholder Tags List…”.

There’s a lot more, but this should be enough to get you

started - take a poke through the various option panes available
in Compile (the list on the left will change to show different
options depending on the export format). Also take a look at the
“Options…” and other “Section Layout…” panels available from
the “Formatting” pane - you’ll see that you can do all sorts of
things, such as choose the case for titles and set the first
pararagraphs of each section to have no first line indent.

Now on to the fourth part…