I’ve been trying to figure out how to include block quotes or poems or any text that requires some special formatting in the middle of a scene without resorting to “Preserve Formatting” blocks and the like. I’d prefer to set the formatting for (as an example) Level 3+ documents, so that I could organize my chapters and scenes thusly:
What has stumped me so far is the ability to suppress scene separators, which I do want between each complete scene, but not between the parts of a scene. If there where a checkbox or other metadata somewhere that I could check to say “do not put separators before or after this document”, then I could set up my compile to adjust all of my block-quote-like passages in one place, and not have to “fake” the scene & chapter separators.
I know this must be a difficult situation to program for, since other people might not organize their binders like this, but I hope this sparks some sort of solution.
I can’t think of anything short of handling the scene breaks manually. I tried playing with inserting the scene break using Formatting and its ability to approach things on a basis of level, but of course that only works for the first bit. You can add the scene break to the level 2 text items using the title prefix field, then you can cut to a level 3 item and style it like a block quote without the scene break prefix, but then you can’t cut back to a level 2 item without it generate a scene break after the block quote. I suppose you could come back with the continuation of the scene after the block quote with a document set to compile ‘As-Is’ so that it excludes the scene break—but that’s starting to push the solution into an area that is less convenient than Preserve Formatting (especially if you put {block quote + preserve formatting} into a formatting preset and then bind a shortcut to that).
But, in a sense using As-Is that way would be your “Don’t use a separator here…” checkbox. So if you’re prepared to use a checkbox in that fashion anyway, maybe the idea works for you. I think it would be too much work to set it and remember to in the first place, but that’s just me.
Yeah, I guess I should have approached the wishlist item from more of a “this is what I want” direction, because maybe having another checkbox would be bad form.
What I want is, at compile time, to be able to identify certain parts of my text for a different kind of formatting than for the rest of the text, without having them treated as separate scenes by the compile process. I want to have the flexibility of the compile settings, so that changing the formatting in one place changes it for all documents of that kind/level, rather than using the not-styles formatting presets+preserve formatting, because I love being able to leave the formatting decisions until the end (and being able to alter them for different submission requirements).
I was thinking that a couple of check-boxes like “no separator before” and “no separator after”, visible (perhaps) in the contents pane of the compile window, would do the trick nicely, but I’m certainly not the best judge of UI design.
Well I think the better solution, ultimately, is to have a better style system in general. Something that is further from the current hybrid system where formatting is there, malleable by the compiler, but not if this is checked but that isn’t and this blue box is here around that, but only some things are protected if options over here are checked. Basically, there is a whole lot of run-around over the fact that there aren’t semantic style ranges in the engine that you can just point to with the compiler and say, “Make that look like this” and move on. So I think that will be the ultimate goal, rather than adding more rigging to the mast.
