posts i actually wrote scrivener ao3So you’ve written your masterpiece and you want to publish to Amazon Createspace because you just can’t stand another rejection notice and want to see it in print, or you want your friends to buy the book so you can have the satisfaction of becoming a published author. I hope that was helpful to someone! Again, it doesn’t do anything beyond italics and scene breaks, but if that’s all you need, you can have them very, very easily with Scrivener 3. (AO3 will automatically add paragraph tags for you if you have a hard return between each of your paragraphs.) When you compile your story, Scrivener will spit out a text file that you can then copy and paste into the HTML upload box on AO3. Now when you want to use it, go to File > Compile, select “Compile for plain text” and your format will appear in the list on the left for you to use. Hit Save, and you’ve got a Compile format. Where it says “Enclosing markers for unstyled italics” type in the HTML for italics (either or, whichever you like), open in the left box and close in the right. If you are like me and you hate smart quotes, click on Transformations and check the box to convert smart punctuation to dumb punctuation.Ĭlick on the pane that says Markup. I like to add a return before and after the so it will end up on a different line, so I can see where it is in the resulting text if you want to do this, you can either hit option-return to type a return in the box or you can type your with surrounding returns in another program and copy/paste it with the returns. For both of these, select them and then click the box on the right that says “Override separator after” and select the dropdown “Custom.” In the little box next to Custom, type in the HTML for a horizontal rule (). Where it says Default Separators, there are options for Folders and Text Files. (I don’t know if this is strictly necessary but it works for me because I just want something that shoves all my scenes together and I don’t have any header sections.) The result looks like this:Ĭlick on the pane that says Separators. In the first pane, the one that says Section Layouts, you can click on every kind of section that isn’t Text Section and delete it because you are probably only working with Text Sections. Click on the cog and uncheck everything that isn’t TXT – because you’re making a format just for text files. Above the list of panes on the left there is a bar that says TXT and a little cog wheel.
Now there are many panes (on the left) of things you can modify. (This is so it will be available to all your projects.) Name it whatever you want (mine is “Fanfiction for AO3″), make sure it has the extension “txt” (in the Extension box in the upper-right-hand corner) and make sure it saves as My Formats rather than Project Formats. In the lower left corner, click on the + sign for “Create a new format” and select “New Format.” In the window that comes up, change the top dropdown to “Compile for plain text (.txt).” However, 95% of the time, I just want italics and scene breaks, so that is what I made for myself. I realize that you may have more complicated HTML needs, in which case you would probably be happier with something like this Google Doc that will create HTML for you. This format does exactly two things with the text: it turns italics into HTML italics, and it adds a horizontal rule between scenes. For those of you who want to have one of these yourself, I will walk you through creating it.
#SCRIVENER COMPILE FORMATTING WINDOWS#
My previous workflow for posting to AO3 from Scrivener involved exporting my work as an OpenOffice document, running Astolat’s OpenOffice conversion macros, and then (usually) manually checking the HTML to make sure everything was what I wanted anyway.īut now that Scrivener 3 has been released (currently Mac-only Windows version forthcoming), the Compile system has been changed, and I am pleased to report that I now have a Scrivener Format for creating very basic AO3-ready HTML just by clicking the Compile button. Hi! I write a lot of long fanfiction, and I write it in Scrivener! If you are a fellow Scrivener user, you are probably aware that getting your work out of the program can occasionally be a challenge, especially if you want to post somewhere like AO3, where what you want is text that has been lightly marked up with a small set of HTML tags rather than a full-on HTML document.