The main purpose of Scrivener is to provide a place that will help you write a long piece of text (whether novel, thesis or factual book), which may be structured as individual pieces in the binder but which can easily be output as one large file for working with “the rest of the world”. Thus, you write, gather and organise the material for your manuscript in the Draft folder, and when you are ready to export or print the manuscript as a whole, you use File Compile... (Ctrl-Shift-E) which takes the contents of the Draft folder, formats it as you specify, and outputs (or prints) it as a single document. Using the various settings available, you can export or print your texts however you like—even regardless of how the files are formatted in Scrivener itself.
Each format has its own group of supplied presets for formatting. Most users will not need to change these presets. If the need arises you can alter almost all of them in a few simple steps. The following are the formats you can output your document to depending on your needs:
Format | Extension | Description |
---|---|---|
Rich Text Format | .rtf | General purpose rich text format supporting multiple fonts, images, tables, bullet points, footnotes and comments. Almost always the best option when exporting for use in a general-purpose word processor. This is a Microsoft Word compatible format. |
Plain Text | .txt | UTF-8 (Unicode) plain-text file. Plain text contains no formatting but can be opened almost anywhere, on all platforms and devices and as such is useful for long-term archival. |
Word Document | .doc | Industry standard Word .doc file. |
Open Document Format | .odt | Format used by OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and other word processors. |
Web Page | .html | Creates a single HTML file suitable for webpublishing. |
eXtensible Web Page | .xhtml | Likewise, though using the newer XHTML format and is thus better suited toward modern web publishing platforms. |
N/A | Use to send the compiled draft directly to your printer. | |
The Portable Document Format is useful for archival and sending copies out for read-only use, as it will look identical on all machines. | ||
PostScript | .ps | A typesetting standard similar to PDF in what it provides, a stable format that will appear identical on any machine or printout, used more commonly in the design and publishing industry. |
ePub eBook | .epub | Generate feature-rich e-books for use in portable reading devices that support the ePub format, such as the Sony Reader, Nook or iPad (ePub files can be dragged into the iTunes Library to import them into iBooks). |
Kindle eBook | .mobi | Generate feature-rich eBooks for use in portable reading devices that support the .mobi format,such as the Amazon Kindle. Requires Amazon’s KindleGen. |
Here are some useful links:
Free Mac User's Manual for Scrivener
Free Windows User's Manual for Scrivener
Scrivener 20% Discount with this Coupon Code
Make sure to download the manual for your version of Scrivener and keep it handy. They are full of useful information and should address any problems you run into.
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