Title Adjustments

Note: The "Title Adjustments" pane only becomes available if one or more of the document types in the "Formatting" pane are set to use a title prefix or suffix in their "Level Settings":

If none of the document types has a title prefix or suffix set, then the "Title Adjustments" pane will be omitted from the available options, as it is not relevant.


Do not add title prefix or suffix to documents...

This option allows you to tell Scrivener not to add title prefixes or suffixes to certain documents during the compile process, regardless of the title settings in the "Formatting" pane.

For instance, suppose you have added a prefix in the "Formatting" pane that will insert a number at the start of all chapter titles, but the first chapter is an introduction that shouldn't be numbered. In that case, you could just click on the "Choose..." button here and pick your introduction chapter from the list of documents in the menu that pops up. Any documents ticked in this menu will not have prefixes or suffixes added to their titles during compile, so by doing this, your introduction will not be numbered like other chapters.


Update titles in document links with prefix and suffix settings

If this option is ticked, any internal document links that contain the title of the document to which they link will be updated during the compile process to include any prefixes and suffixes set in the "Level Settings" of the "Formatting" pane.

Do not include title suffixes in updated links: If this is ticked then suffixes will not be added to titles that appear inside internal document links.

Override title prefix separator for updated links: If this is ticked, the characters in the text box replace any blank space (such as line breaks) and punctuation characters that appear at the end of the prefix in the "Level Settings" area of the "Formatting" pane.

An example should make the purpose of these settings clear. Suppose we have a chapter folder entitled "The Tea Smuggling Ring", and that another document contains a link to this chapter folder, like so:

And suppose that in the Formatting > Level Settings... area of Compile, we have set it up so that chapter folders have a title prefix containing "Chapter" followed by an auto-number and a line break, and a title suffix containing a line break and a star, like so:

This title prefix and suffix will mean that the document entitled "The Tea Smuggling Ring" will be compiled using the title "Chapter [something]" followed by "The Tea Smuggling Ring" on a new line, followed by a star on another new line, using whatever formatting we have set up for these elements in the "Formatting" pane, like this:

But what of our document link reference to this chapter in the text? This is where our Title Adjustments options come in. If "Update titles in document links with prefix and suffix settings" is unticked, then the text of our link will remain unchanged in the output:

If, however, we tick "Update titles in document links with prefix and suffix settings", then the "Chapter Three" prefix and star suffix will be included in our reference. You can see the problem, though - our prefix ("Chapter Three") and suffix (the star) have line breaks around them, so if we just updated any references in the text to use the updated title exactly as-is, then our text would look like this:

To avoid this undesirable result, Scrivener strips out the line breaks, and uses the characters you enter in the Title prefix separator for updated links between the prefix and title instead. So, supposing the title prefix separator is a hyphen with a space either side of it (the default), the actual output from Scrivener would be this:

Title suffixes are often used for tags or other elements that you wouldn't want to appear in updated document links, and this is the case here - clearly we don't want the star suffix to appear in our in-text references. So, we just need to tick Do not include title suffixes in updated links and recompile to get the desired result:

The "Title Adjustments" options thus provide an extra level of control over how the titles set up in the "Formatting" pane appear throughout the compiled document.