Choose a scene-break ornament

What this is for

Between two scenes in a chapter the book prints a scene break. Out of the box that's three spaced asterisks, which is perfectly respectable. Many authors would rather have a small drawing there—a flourish, a sprig, a star—and this page is how you choose one, how tall and wide it prints, and how much room it gets.

Where the setting lives

Open Chapter header setup from—in the manuscript list (on the left, hover the Chapters heading and click the small icongear beside the book's title) it—and look for Images. The first slot is Scene-break ornament. Whatever you set here prints at every scene break in the book, in the paperback and the ebook alike. A chapter that wants something different can have its own: open the chapter's … menu and choose Chapter images….

Picking a picture

Click Choose… and the picture chooser opens. Along the top are the places a picture can come from: this book's own uploads, its series', everything you keep for all your books—and Stock, the library of ornaments that comes with Write.

The stock library

Write ships with a few dozen ornaments you may use in any book, free of charge and without crediting anyone. They are sorted by genre—fantasy, romance, science fiction, cozy, mystery, horror, holiday and so on—and come in two weights:

• Bold ornaments are small illustrations, two or three lines tall: a dragon, a rose, a ringed planet, a teacup.
• Fine ornaments are thin typographic rules a line tall, with a small motif in the middle: a crescent moon, a key, a compass star.

Click a genre to narrow the shelf, or Bold / Fine, and click an ornament to choose it. If you have no pictures of your own yet, the chooser opens on Stock to begin with.

Stock ornaments are drawn in one ink, which means they take on the colour of the page wherever they print: black in the paperback, white when a reader's app is in night mode, and white on the editor's dark page. You never need a second version.

Your own picture

Click Upload… at the bottom of the chooser to add one of your own—a PNG, JPEG or SVG under 25 MB. A PNG with a transparent background is the usual kind; an SVG prints sharp at any size. Once uploaded it's in your media library for any book you like. Below the slot, Write tells you whether the file is sharp enough for the size you've chosen; if it says a bigger file is needed, that's for the paperback, where 300 dots per inch is the standard.

Height, width and air

Three settings sit beside the picture, and every one is measured in lines of your book's own leading, so the page grid holds and the first line after a break always lands where it should.

• Height — how many lines tall the ornament is: 1, 2 or 3. Fine rules want 1; illustrations usually want 2.
• Width — how much of the measure (the width of the text) it may take: the full measure, two-thirds, half or a third. This matters most for the fine rules: a thin line a single line tall would otherwise stretch to the whole width of the page, which is more than most want. Half is a good place to start.
• Air — the lines of space above and below every break: one, or two for a heavier picture. This works with no picture at all, if you'd like the asterisks to have more room.

Below the slot, a small preview shows the picture, and a line of text says the size it will print on your page.

Taking it away

None beside the slot goes back to the asterisks. The picture stays in your library; nothing is deleted.

Seeing it in the editor

A break between two scenes only exists where the chapter is put together, so you'll see it in the Pages view and in the finished book rather than while you're writing one scene. If you want to see what an ornament looks like on the page as you work, put a break inside a scene for a moment, from the Paragraph style menu.