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Hi, all

I was able to create a basic index, but the page numbers are off. Manuscript was written with Scrivener in Garamond font, size 11. I've been trying to find a matching font in the Nisus available fonts, but no luck. I'm hoping with a matching font that the page numbers will be accurately reflected. Someone on the Scrivener forum recommended Nisus for indexing.

Is there a way to import the Garamond font into Nisus, or can anyone suggest a matching font, please? My manuscript is 433 pages long, and the index is all that needs to be done now. (There's other formatting in the manuscript that didn't import correctly, such as centering of titles, et cetera, but I don't think it will affect the index output.)

My next question will probably be how to export the index only and append it to the Scrivener manuscript PDF. Ultimate destination is CreateSpace.

Any help greatly appreciated

~ Celeste ~

Hi Celeste,

First of all, if Garamond—of whatever flavour ... I have both Adobe Garamond Pro and EB Garamond—is on your Mac, which you can check by opening FontBook and seeing if it's there, then it should be available to NWP. Or did you produce your PDF on a different machine which has Garamond and the one with NWP doesn't? In that case, I'd have a look at EB Garamond, which is open source and available from http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/

Secondly, as an old Scrivener and NWP hand can I ask, given that you wanted to index your manuscript in NWP, why, rather than compiling to PDF, didn't you compile it to RTF and open that directly in NWP—the two programs both have RTF as their native format and work together brilliantly—and then, when you had done the indexing, get NWP to produce the PDF you need, complete with index?



Mark

Mark's excellent advice is spot on.

Nisus Writer should be showing whatever fonts you have installed on your Mac, including Garamond if it's available.

As for the indexing, it sounds like you have an existing document, external to Nisus Writer. You then want to open that content in Nisus Writer, create just an index, and then add the generated index to your other document externally. That's going to be really tricky. For the page numbers to be correct and match the external document, your text will have to be paginated exactly the same in both Nisus Writer and wherever else. Even if you have all fonts working properly, you'll have to ensure all aspects of the text are exactly the same, including line spacing, indents, margins, font sizes, kerning, etc. And even if everything is a perfect match, you still can't be absolutely sure there won't be some minor difference in pagination, perhaps due to a difference in the text engines. I can almost guarantee this will be a huge headache.

Mark's advice to produce the full PDF (with the main content + generated index) exclusively in Nisus Writer is definitely the easier way to do this.

xiamenese wrote:Hi Celeste,

First of all, if Garamond—of whatever flavour ... I have both Adobe Garamond Pro and EB Garamond—is on your Mac, which you can check by opening FontBook and seeing if it's there, then it should be available to NWP. Or did you produce your PDF on a different machine which has Garamond and the one with NWP doesn't? In that case, I'd have a look at EB Garamond, which is open source and available from http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/

Secondly, as an old Scrivener and NWP hand can I ask, given that you wanted to index your manuscript in NWP, why, rather than compiling to PDF, didn't you compile it to RTF and open that directly in NWP—the two programs both have RTF as their native format and work together brilliantly—and then, when you had done the indexing, get NWP to produce the PDF you need, complete with index?



Mark

Mark, thanks for the reply and my apologies for the delay. I've been experimenting and trying to implement your suggestions. But I've run into some snags.

I had already tried importing with RTF format and saw that my page count had decreased. Soon figured out that was because it wasn't inserting all the page breaks (for blank pages) where I had indicated them on the Scrivener compile function (although it works on PDF output). My format is to have Section titles on an odd page, followed by a blank page, followed by a chapter. All chapters begin on odd pages, so some of them have a blank page before them and some of them don't, depending on whether a chapter ends on an odd or even page. I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, long story short, here's a quick overview of my outline and what I'm encountering.
1 - copyright page, no page number, okay
2 - blank page, no page number, okay
3 - dedication page, no page number, okay
4 - blank page, no page number, okay
5 - anecdotal story, no page number, okay
6 - blank page, no page number, okay
7 - Introduction, two pages without page numbers, okay
8 - Section I title, no page number, okay
9 - blank page, supposed to be no page number but it keeps inserting page 6 despite multiple attempts to delete it
10 - Chapter 1 - it inserts page number 5. I want it to be 3, but it's not a big deal
11 - pages 6, 7, and 8 are numbered correctly, but then it jumps numbering to 11. I keep replacing it with "9," but no joy
12 - next pages numbered correctly as 10 through 17
13 - page 18 is a blank page and it won't let me delete the "18"; it looks like it's deleted, but when I scroll back through it, it reappears
14 - after that point I checked it through page 65 and so far so good, including Section II title followed by a blank page without the page number, as it shoud be. There's hundreds of pages, so I had to stop for now.

Obviously items 9 and 13 are the sticklers for me right now.

I got the Mac recently so I could take advantage of Scrivener's additional features that aren't available in Windows version. I'll have to check and see how to get into FontBook. The Garamond font is on this machine and that's the font used in Scrivener. Garamond shows up in RTF format in Nisus, but not in PDF.

Your suggestion is good to finalize the manuscript in RTF and then export to PDF. CreateSpace accepts either format.

My apologies for this long post, but I wanted to make sure I didn't leave out any info. I'm obviously very new to Nisus and fumbling my way through it.

~ Celeste ~

Hi, Celeste,

I hope I'm following your chapter/section right. Also, if you've just moved to Mac and are therefore new to NWP, welcome, though it must mean learning a new application. NWP is great and a great companion to Scrivener.

My immediate reaction to your two 'sticklers' would be, in NWP, to insert a couple of blank lines on those pages followed by a "Section Break New Page"; make sure your cursor is on one of the blank lines above, go to the "Header/Footer" palette, and then tick "This section has: hidden footers", and "… hidden headers" if necessary.

Martin, or perhaps someone else even more expert than me may be along to suggest an even simpler solution.



Mark

xiamenese wrote:Hi, Celeste,

I hope I'm following your chapter/section right. Also, if you've just moved to Mac and are therefore new to NWP, welcome, though it must mean learning a new application. NWP is great and a great companion to Scrivener.

My immediate reaction to your two 'sticklers' would be, in NWP, to insert a couple of blank lines on those pages followed by a "Section Break New Page"; make sure your cursor is on one of the blank lines above, go to the "Header/Footer" palette, and then tick "This section has: hidden footers", and "… hidden headers" if necessary.

Martin, or perhaps someone else even more expert than me may be along to suggest an even simpler solution.



Mark

Mark, thanks.

I spent a couple more hours on NWP last night and discovered more problems. Bullets formatting improperly, title headers on blank pages, no header on some pages of chapter text although they should be there, sometimes a blank page correctly inserted following a new section but other times not, et cetera, and that's only 25% of the way through the manuscript.

Scrivener does have a problem with outputting double bullets on anything but PDF, which I used Sigil to make corrections in the epub version, but I don't want to go through that again with RTF because there's a lot of bullets since it's a somewhat technical manuscript. At this point, having spent many hours trying to solve the issue of an index, I'm just going to do it by hand. That way I can just do search and find through the PDF, note the relevant pages, and then create an index at the end of the manuscript in Scrivener. It will probably take about 10 hours, but at least it will be accurate.

NWP is probably great if someone is starting a manuscript from scratch and can fix errors as they arise, but a 425-page manuscript that is replete with errors is not worth this type of hassle.

Thanks so much for your help. I perused the forum last night and it looks like there are many helpful members here.

~ Celeste ~

Celeste,

I think you'd better share an excerpt of the file. A few pages will do. I've formatted over a hundred books, ranging from 180 to 400 pages, with or without images, mostly published on Amazon. But I've never experienced the troubles you listed. I remember a bug that the header showed in a blank page, but it was some ten years ago in the days before NWP and it's long dead now. Are you sure you are using section breaks, not page breaks?

Greetings, Henry.

Groucho wrote:I think you'd better share an excerpt of the file.

I agree with Groucho.

If you are new to Nisus, you must know that you don't have to worry about giving away any personal information if you use the macro "Redact". If it isn't already in your macro folder, you can get the latest version (from 2016) here:
https://nisus.com/pro/macros/browse.php?keywords=Redact

It "irreversibly scrambles all text in a document, while generally trying to preserve text layout. Also replaces any images with generic placeholder graphics." [From the Nisus Website]

Also don't hesitate to upload screenshots of problematic issues. It's often easier to detect what's wrong, if one sees an image.

NWP is probably great if someone is starting a manuscript from scratch and can fix errors as they arise, but a 425-page manuscript that is replete with errors is not worth this type of hassle.

If the errors are not completely at random, there should be fairly easy to fix such long documents in Nisus, provided you haven't discovered some unknown bugs.

Scrivener does have a problem with outputting double bullets on anything but PDF […], but I don't want to go through that again with RTF because there's a lot of bullets since it's a somewhat technical manuscript.

Double bullets, one after the other? If Scrivener can't export them to a RTF, I would insert some unique special character after the first bullet instead. That should enable Nisus to fix all instances with Find and Replace where you want to have double bullets.