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 a header and footer, 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, 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 “Custom” is chosen next to “Format As” (Custom represents the settings that have been saved into the project. In this case, the tutorial has been set up to compile a document that look as it does in the editor).
	3.	Ensure “PDF (.pdf)” is selected next to “Compile For”.
	4.	Click on “Compile”.
	5.	Enter a destination and file name for the PDF and click Save.
	6.	Open the PDF produced by Scrivener.
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 “Novel” format (be sure you choose “PDF (.pdf)” 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.
That’s all you need to know for creating basic print-outs and exported files from your draft. At some point, though, you may find that you want more control over the document that gets produced. Try going back to the Compile dialog and clicking on the expansion arrow:

The Compile dialog 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. This time, with the compile dialog expanded to show all of the advanced options, try the following:
	1.	Choose “Custom” from the “Format As” list again, to return to the tutorial project’s saved settings.
	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.	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.
	4.	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. We’re going to override the formatting, though, so click on this button to tick it.

	5.	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 get 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.
	6.	Click the “Modify” button and then into the bold “Title” text in the dialog window that appear. 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.

	7.	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 before the documents of the folder type whenever they start on a new page. (You’ll see what I mean in a minute.)
	8.	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.
	9.	Click the “Modify” button and then into the bold title in the dialog. 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.
	10.	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 the (who’d have thought it) line spacing.
	11.	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.
	12.	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.
	13.	For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”.
	14.	For the “Folder and text separator”, choose “Single return”. This will ensure that the text of any documents following our folder get added straight after the folder titles which we set up in our formatting options.
	15.	Right, at last, click on the “Compile For” drop down and select “Preview”. Then click “Compile” to open a preview.
Take a look through the preview document to see what you’ve done—you’ve added titles and completely changed the way the text looks. Once you’re happy with that, click the preview click the “Close” button to return to the Compile dialog. We’re just going to make one 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:

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 the “Modify” button and into the 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).

Now onto the fourth part…