General

In general, you don’t need to do anything special when writing to have your format recognised by Vellum. Bold and italics will be be picked up, as will centred text, as you can see below:

Centred Text

Using Styles

For other types of formatting, though, you will want to make use of Scrivener’s styles. For instance, for subheadings, such as the one above, use Scrivener’s Heading 2 style.

If you want a section of text to be flush-left (without any indentation), you need to create a Flush Left parag...

Links and Images

And this is the start of a new one.

If you write your scenes or sections in separate documents, Scrivener will automatically add the necessary separators during Compile so that Vellum can turn them into ornamental breaks.

If you would like an ornamental break inside a document simply leave an empty line, like this:

The above blank line will appear as an ornamental break in Vellum. (You should avoid leaving blank lines in your manuscript otherwise—use line spacing instead.)

Links

You don’t need ...

How to Export

Once you’ve finished writing in Scrivener and are ready to export to Vellum, simply do the following:

1. Go to File > Compile…

2. Ensure “Microsoft Word (.docx)” is selected as the file type and “Vellum Export” is selected as the format.

3. Have a look through the Section Layouts preview in the central column of the Compile window to make sure everything looks as you wish. If not, or if the information box is telling you that no Section Layouts have been applied, click on “Assign Section Layo...

How it Works

As long as you use the “Vellum Export” Compile format and have the Section Layouts set up, Vellum will recognise the parts and chapters of your project and import them appropriately. To achieve this, the “Vellum Export” format closely follows Vellum’s advanced documentation for importing Word documents, generating special named styles that tell Vellum what each element in the project is.

But you don’t need to worry about any of that—Scrivener does it for you. And if you created your project from...

Moving On

That’s pretty much all you need to know—everything else in this guide is optional, for those who want to add dedication or epigraph pages, or who need to add subtitles for their chapter titles. Feel free to skip it if you don’t need any of these features.

The Front Matter Folder

Some books may require a dedication or epigraph page at the front. For this, you will need to add front matter. (If you don’t need a dedication or epigraph page, there is rarely any need to add front matter, since Vellum will generate a title page automatically from the information you enter into Compile’s metadata area.)

To add front matter:

1. Create a folder somewhere in the project (outside of the Draft folder) to store the front matter items. In this project, I’ve created a “Vellum” subfol...

The Title Page

The title page should contain no empty lines (do not place empty lines at the top of it or between the title and author name).

The book title should have a Book Title paragraph style applied to it and the author name should have an Author paragraph style applied. If the book requires a subtitle, then apply a Book Subtitle style.

The Dedication Page

If you wish to add a dedication page, ensure it appears in the front matter folder in its own document with no empty lines, and that the text is formatted using a Dedication paragraph style.

The Epigraph Page

For an epigraph page, likewise create it as a separate document inside the front matter folder and assign an Epigraph style to it. If the epigraph requires an attribution, place the attribution on the line below and assign it Scrivener’s Attribution style.

Missing Styles

Note that the following styles, although mentioned in this guide, are not supplied by Scrivener by default:

• “Book Title”

• “Book Subtitle”

• “Author”

• “Dedication”

• “Epigraph”

• “Flush Left”

If you need any of these styles, therefore, you will need to create them yourself. You can do so by first creating the text and then using Format > Style > New Style from Selection…

In fact, it doesn’t really matter how the text that uses these styles looks as long as it has the correctly-named sty...

Importing Styles

If you do need one of the six styles mentioned above, there’s an even quicker way of creating them: you can import them from this sample project, since this project already has all of these styles set up. To do so:

1. In your own project, go to Format > Style > Import Styles…

2. In the file dialogue that appears, find and select this “VellumExample” project.

3. Click “Import”.

4. If asked, choose “Keep Existing Styles”.

This will add to your project only the styles from this project that it ...

Subtitles

Chapter titles are automatically exported to Vellum. On rare occasions, though, you might have a book that requires subtitles for its chapters, too. For instance, you might have a chapter entitled “The Great War” that requires the subtitle “1914-1918”.

To achieve this:

1. Go to Project > Project Settings…

2. Select “Custom Metadata” in the list on the left.

3. Click “+” to create a new metadata field and name it “Subtitle”.

4. Enter the subtitles for chapters that require them into the new ...

Template Info

If you plan on exporting many projects to Vellum, you might consider creating your own project template with Vellum front matter and styles already set up. Here’s how:

1. Start with an empty project. For instance, suppose you want to base your template on the Novel template, first create an empty project from that. (Tip: Hold down “Option” while clicking on the “Choose…” button in the project templates panel to prevent Scrivener from replacing all of the template variables in the project. This ...