Scrivener Compile: Hot off the Press

I write in Scrivener 3 and import the text into Vellum 2 to create my ebooks. Up until now, the process hasn’t been streamlined because some of the elements don’t import into Vellum seamlessly. This means I’ve had to adjust the formatting manually in Vellum after the import.

But Scrivener and Vellum have just announced an update to their software, making it easier to use these two programs together.

links and formatting options like block quotations and sans-serif will import perfectly.

Scrivener has added a Vellum Export option in their Compile feature:

Importing Scrivener Styles into Vellum

Vellum has excellent support for importing Word (.docx) files, and interprets various elements inside those files to work out how the book should be arranged and formatted. Vellum should have broken up your manuscript into the correct structure, maintaining all titles and text formatting.

Although Vellum will preserve bold, italics and centred paragraphs, you’ll need to use styles in Scrivener for Vellum to recognise features such as block quotes and headings.

• Use the Block Quote style in Scrivener to have quotes recognised by Vellum.
• For an attribution after a quote, type the attribution on the line immediately after the quote and use the Attribution style.
• If you want a caption beneath an image, place the caption on a new line after the image in Scrivener’s editor and use the Caption style.
• For subheadings inside documents, use the Heading 2 style.
• If you need any text kept flush left (that is, without any indentation), create a Flush Left style in Scrivener (using Format > Style > New Style from Selection) and use that.

Here’s the Scrivener article that details how the Export to Vellum compile needs to be set up.

You can download a sample project from Scrivener demonstrating everything you need to get to grips with the new compile directions.

Download Sample Scrivener Project to illustrate the file set up