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TL; DR
For those who don’t want to follow along all my missteps and wander down the dead ends of my learning, let me sum up here how my Scrivener is set up.
System Preferences
As you see here, I have most everything turned off. Most of that is just personal preference, though smart quotes may have caused me a little trouble in the transition from Scrivener to markdown to GitHub.
I’ve also adjusted my preference for date formatting, because I’m using Scrivener’s placeholders for date and time up at the top of this booklet.
I think that’s all that I’ve touched.
Scrivener Preferences
In Scrivener preferences, if I don’t mention it here, I have left it alone (or believe that I have).
General
Under Saving, I have auto-save after 2 seconds. I didn’t have “Take snapshots”, but just checked it now, because why not.
I have no shared templates but that may change when I actually use this setup for something.
I have Automatic Quit set to 10 minutes, because I use Scrivener on both laptop and home machine, and the quit gives me a better chance of not having it open on the other computer. No good can come of having a project open on two computers, although Scrivener seems to handle it pretty well.
Editing
Default text zoom: 150 because I have tiny little eyes.
Behaviors
Double-Clicking is enabled, so that I can double click in the cork board mode and create a new card. I noticed that I seemed to have the habit of trying that, so I enabled it.
Appearance
Under Scrivenings, I have “Show title in Scrivenings” enabled. I don’t use the Scrivenings mode often but when I do I prefer to see the titles.
Corrections
I don’t think any of these are changed, but …
- Auto-Correction: Capitalize “i”, superscript ordinals, symbol and text substitutions
- Punctuation: Disable smart dashes
- Data-Detection: Automatically detect web addresses
- Auto-completion: all items checked
Sharing
No changes, I think …
Backup
Turn on auto backups, project close, before synching, compress, keep 5.
Compile Format
Here’s where the metaphorical rubber meets the virtual road. I’ve created a custom compile format, and it’s full of changes.
When I start a compile, it looks like this:
My special compile format is RJ GitHub, and the section types shown on the right are my special ones, Section and Sub-Section. We’ll come to those in a bit. There’s nothing special in the tags and replacement buttons at top right, but in the Settings (gear) I have some important items turned off:
In particular, I wanted “Convert rich text to MultiMarkdown” turned off. The reason is that I type Markdown pound signs and other forms directly, and this check box escapes those, defeating my purpose. If you set up all the right rich text styles, you might want to go the other way. For now, I’m sticking with old school.
Double-clicking my format, we can start looking at the details:
Section Layouts
In section layouts there’s really nothing special on the initial page, and none of the other tabs have anything changed in them.
I have it adding closing hashes to titles, which is, I believe, the default.
Separators
I’ve overridden the default separators on Folders and Text Files in my layouts. The ones I actually use are called “Use” this and that:
It turns out that these settings are important. Section break, in the top one, inserts the default page separator, four dashes, that my splitter script searches for. It would be possible to put in a more unique separator, as AmberV’s example, referenced elsewhere, does.
The three other sections are experimental and I won’t trouble you with them.
Text Layout
This one puts a separator at the end of the document, namely ahead of the magic references links that my splitter script looks for. If I didn’t include this, it would be difficult for splitter to find and break off the references, which we insert into every page we split out.
Processing
Here’s where we put the link to our Ruby splitter script, which divides up Scrivener’s big output file into the smaller files we want for GitHub pages. The path has to be a legitimate path to the file. The operating system $PATH or equivalent variables are not interrogated.
The arguments will automatically include the name of the output file, and the script will be running in the Scrivener output folder. The > test.txt is there so that I can see what happened during the run of splitter. Generally I don’t look.
Layout Assignments
We assign a section layout to each section type in Scrivener. There’s a button at the bottom of the middle section of the compile panel that says “Assign Section Layouts” and, well, that’s what it does. It opens another panel looking like this:
I have “Section” assigned to “Use Section w/ Sep, Heading Text, and “Sub-Section” is assigned to “Use SubSection”. (I often name things that are intended to be “used” with the word “Use” in their name, as a reminder.)
I believe that if I were to assign “As-Is” to “Sub-Section” it would probably also work, but “Use SubSection” is what I’m using and I’m sticking to it.
Forum Links
Here are links to entries on the excellent Scrivener forum, addressing some of the issues I’ve had, including most of those mentioned here:
- Trailing Spaces in Title Header on Folders Only
- Creating a GitHub Pages “booklet” using Scrivener
- Compiling To LaTeX – One file per section?
- Can MMD compile folder and file name extension differ? Or even the names?
- Compiling vanilla MMD, can’t get rid of title?
There are other topics I’ve created or spoken to. You can search the forum for my name to find them, but the above are the ones that seem to me to be of the most potential interest.
Splitter
Here’s a current copy of splitter, the one used to publish this version:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'tempfile'
SPLIT_MARKER = "----\n\n"
TOC_MARKER = "<!--TOC-->\n"
Titles = {}
def add_toc(chunk)
halves = chunk.split(TOC_MARKER)
puts "halves length %d" % halves.length
return chunk if halves.length != 2
return halves[0] + table_of_contents + halves[1]
end
def make_file_name(filenumber)
return "index.md" if filenumber == 0
return sprintf("%02d.md", filenumber)
end
def make_link_line(filenumber, max_length)
link = ""
link += "[%s](%02d.html) | " % [Titles[filenumber - 1], filenumber - 1] unless filenumber == 0
link += "[Top](index.html) | "
link += "[%s](%02d.html)" % [Titles[filenumber + 1], filenumber + 1] unless filenumber >= max_length
return link
end
def record_titles(chunks)
filenumber = 0
chunks.each do | chunk |
title = chunk.split("\n")[0]
Titles[filenumber] = title.strip[2..-3]
filenumber += 1
end
end
def table_of_contents
toc = ""
Titles.each_pair do | number, title |
# toc += "* [" + title + "](" + make_file_name(number) + ")\n"
toc += "* [%s](%s)\n" % [title, make_file_name(number)]
end
return toc
end
def update_table_of_contents(chunks)
toc_chunk = chunks.delete_at(0)
updated_toc = add_toc(toc_chunk)
chunks.insert(0, updated_toc)
end
def write_file(chunk, reference_chunk, filenumber, max_length)
filename = make_file_name(filenumber)
title = Titles[filenumber]
puts filename + ": " + title
tf = File.new(filename, "w")
tf.print chunk
tf.puts
tf.puts
tf.puts make_link_line(filenumber, max_length)
tf.puts
tf.puts
tf.print reference_chunk
tf.puts
tf.puts
tf.close
end
def write_files(chunks, reference_chunk)
filenumber = 0
chunks.each do |chunk|
write_file(chunk, reference_chunk, filenumber, chunks.length - 1) unless chunk.length < 1
filenumber += 1
end
end
ARGF.set_encoding(Encoding::UTF_8)
input = ARGF.read
chunks = input.split(SPLIT_MARKER)
reference_chunk = chunks.delete_at(-1)
record_titles(chunks)
update_table_of_contents(chunks)
write_files(chunks, reference_chunk)
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