Chapter 33 · The Project
Compiling a Whole Project
You write a novel in whatever pieces suit you: a document per chapter, three scenes in one file, or one long river of prose. Compile is where you say how each kind of section should present itself, and get one manuscript out. The pieces you draft in never have to look like the book.
Opening the compile page
Open a novel project and press ⬗ Compile manuscript in the project's actions,
below the tools. The page lives at /project/<id>/compile.
The button appears on novel projects only. Screenplays, stage plays, audio drama and video scripts are delivered a document at a time, from the Export menu beside each document in the binder. Compile belongs to the project's owner, so a document shared with you is not a project you can assemble.
The page has two columns. Contents on the left is the book as it stands, Section layouts on the right is the set of rules that produced it. Every change on the right redraws the left, because a rule whose effect you cannot see until you open the file is a rule you will get wrong.
The Contents list
Each document gets a row with a tick box, its title, and its part name if it sits in one. Under it come its sections: a kind chip, the heading the manuscript will actually print, and that section's word count. A greyed row is being left out. The summary line above reads something like 34 sections · 91,204 words · 2 left out.
The order is binder order: documents outside a part first, then parts in alphabetical order
by name, and inside each part the order you arranged. Read the order off this list rather than
assuming it, particularly if your parts are named Part One and
Part Three.
The tick boxes are per document, so unticking one removes everything in it. There is no per-section tick, so to leave out a single chapter, put it in its own document or cut it. A document with nothing written in it still gets a row, with a dash for its kind and Nothing written yet for its title, and it keeps its tick box so your choice about it survives the day you finally write in it.
Word counts are of the words the manuscript will contain, so text struck through in suggestion mode is already out of the count.
The four kinds of section
A section boundary is a heading at level 1 or level 2. Everything before the first heading in a document is its opening, which is the right answer for a project written a scene per file with no headings: one document, one opening section, no invented chapter.
What a heading becomes is decided by its first word, lowercased:
| Kind | A heading starting with |
|---|---|
| Front matter | prologue, preface, preamble,
foreword, introduction, dedication |
| Back matter | epilogue, afterword,
acknowledg…, appendix, coda |
| Chapter | anything else, including a freely titled one like
The Long Winter |
The match is on the start of the heading, so Epilogue: Ten Years On is back
matter and An Epilogue is a chapter. A section wearing the wrong chip is fixed in the
heading rather than in the settings.
One more heading rule catches people. A heading struck through entirely stops being a boundary, and its text joins the section above. Remember that when a chapter you can still see on screen has vanished from the Contents list.
Section layouts
Each of the four kinds has the same five controls, and they apply to every section of that kind in the book:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| The kind's tick box | Untick it and no section of that kind reaches the manuscript. |
| Title | No title, As written, Numbered, or Numbered + title. |
| Numbering | The label, with {n} standing in for the number. Defaults
to Chapter {n}. Up to 80 characters. |
| Numerals | 12, XII, or Twelve. |
| Separator | Printed centred between consecutive sections of this kind, never
before the first one. # # # is the usual choice. Up to 80 characters. |
| Start a new page | A page break before each section of this kind. |
Out of the box the rules are these, which is a normal manuscript:
| Kind | Title | New page |
|---|---|---|
| Front matter | As written | Yes |
| Opening | No title | No |
| Chapter | Numbered + title, Chapter {n}, arabic | Yes |
| Back matter | As written | Yes |
Numbered + title prints Chapter Twelve — The Long Winter, and
falls back to the label alone on a chapter you never titled. Storskarvia never puts a page break
before the first section and never stacks two in a row, so a document that already ends on a page
break does not produce a blank leaf.
Everything saves as you go. Picking from a menu saves at once, typing waits until you stop, and a Saving… then Saved label sits beside the Compile button.
Numbering
A chapter's number is its position among the chapters actually in the book, so leaving chapter three out makes the old chapter four into chapter three. Each kind counts separately: excluding a piece of front matter does not disturb your chapter numbers.
The alternative fails quietly. Numbering by binder position would hand you a manuscript that runs eleven, thirteen, fourteen, and you would find out from a reader.
Front matter
Title page is the lead tick box: the title and your name on their own page. Below it, Front matter opens the pages before page one. Each field with something in it becomes its own leaf, and a field left blank prints nothing rather than a blank page.
| Field | Notes | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Blank uses the project title | 300 |
| Subtitle | Centred under the title | 300 |
| Series line | Italic, centred | 200 |
| Author | Blank uses the name on your account | 200 |
| Copyright page | One line per line, on its own leaf | 2,000 |
| Dedication | Centred italic | 600 |
| Epigraph | Centred italic | 2,000 |
| Epigraph source | Printed under it as — Marcus Aurelius | 200 |
Anything longer than its limit is trimmed when the setting saves, with no warning. If a copyright page comes back shorter than you wrote it, that is why.
Left blank, Author uses the name on your account, which you set on your account page or when you signed up. An account with no name falls back to the part of your email before the @, which flatters very few people.
Table of contents is a tick box at the bottom. In PDF it is a real contents page with page numbers, in Word a live field you can refresh, and in every other format a list of the headings. Turning the title page off leaves the rest of the front matter alone: switching off one page does not throw away the others.
Compiling to a file
Pick from Compile to and press Compile.
The menu offers EPUB (.epub), Word (.docx), PDF
(.pdf), RTF (.rtf), OpenDocument (.odt), HTML
(.html), Markdown (.md) and plain text (.txt).
The file is named after the project, with characters a filesystem might object to removed,
falling back to manuscript if nothing usable survives. The compiled book is an
ordinary Storskarvia novel document handed to the same writers a single document uses, so the
formatting matches a single novel export. More on the
formats in Part VIII.
Pressing Compile saves your settings before it downloads, so changing a rule and compiling immediately gets you the rule you just changed.
When it will not compile
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| No Compile button on the project | The project is not a novel. Use the Export menu on each document. |
| Nothing to compile yet. | The project has no documents yet. |
| Nothing is included in the compile yet. | Every document is unticked, or every kind is switched off. Tick something back on. |
| Could not save those settings | The save did not reach the server, so the page and the file would disagree. Check your connection, then change any setting to retry. |
| A chapter is missing from Contents | Its heading is struck through, its document is unticked, or its heading sits at level 3 or lower. |
Documents with zero retention switched on are fetched from your storage for both the Contents list and the download, so the book you are shown is the book you get. If a provider is disconnected or its access has expired, fix that first. A document Storskarvia cannot read is a document it cannot compile.
Updated 2026-09-09 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?