Apply new formatting w/o losing your italics & bolds

I am using the formatting presets to try to get some order to what I see on the screen (not compiling).

So I made a bit of text with a title, header, sub-header, block quote and regular body text. I set all at the font, point sizes & spacing I want to see and defined some presets based on those. So now I can just go through the document and select headings and quotes and hit the presets.

The only problem is that if I have some bolding, italics, underlining, strikethroughs, etc. that I want to be preserved. They all get set back to normal text. Is there a way to set the font and point sizes, indents and spacing you like and apply the formatting preset without having your bolds and italics, etc. all come undone?

This making me crazy. I know that there is a way to do this but my google foo is failing me & I just messed up a couple dozen pages of text that I have to go in and re-edit because I did not realize all my bolds and italics and such were being undone. I have been away from scrivener a while but could swear that I once knew how to do this.

I tried re-define the formatting with various options toggled (“save character attributes”, etc.) then changing the font, the size and randomly bolding and underlining things. Then hit format and all gets changed to the new basic font & size but again all the italics and bolds and underlines are now just plain text.

YOU FOOL!

Indeed I was down this road before. And a hard to find answer! but I must have inadvertently twiddled something wrong and indeed skipped right over the correct answer in my test file. It is a little non-intuitive (to me). Since it is not Character Attributes you are trying to preserve (thought that is what is sounds like)… Paragraph styles …

Short version:
When you define a Preset, make sure to choose Save paragraph style. If you select Save all formatting (which is what it defaults too (WHY?)) or Save character attributes (I thought I was being smart here, & that was the one that would do it, but no!) your bolds and italics are toast.

ah ha.
Save paragraph style
Save paragraph style
Save paragraph style

right?

Well, kp8, now that’s a lttle hash to call the OP a fool for that mistake, but since OP=kp8, I guess you get first call on that one. :wink:

Glad you got it figured!
gr