I do a synopsis in a research doc in a different font and color. When I apply a style, it changes the font and color to the font and color (black) that my manuscript is in. I would prefer that applying the style leaves the font and color as they are. Having this doc in a different font and color sets it off for me in the editor, contrasting it with actual manuscript text.
I tried to create the style without it implying the font and color, just the paragraph structure. Unsuccessfully.
Is there a way to create a style (or update it) to get it to not change the font and color when applied? I haven’t been able to find a way to do this.
Yeah, that’s what a “Paragraph Style” is, as defined by the user manual in §15.6.2, The Basics of Styles. Look to figure 15.11, which displays the different icons you will see next to styles. Your goal is to have a style with ¶ all by itself, not ¶a. The underscore ‘a’ means this style has stored full character style information, and will apply that character formatting to the whole paragraph (though it will try to sensibly exclude inline formatting where it can—you shouldn’t see revision colour markings vanish, for example, or even ad hoc colouring that only covers a few words).
You can retroactively remove the character formatting from a style by redefining it (pg. 417). You must set the Formatting dropdown to “Save Paragraph Style”.
Sorry to side-track, but this is something I’ve struggled with; when I paste in text, sometimes I bring with it the formatting from another source. I apply a paragraph + character style to it, hoping to make it conform to all the rest of the text that I have in my editor. Sometimes that works, and other times, the font remains the same, or the font size, or the color of the text… even though I have all of those attributes set as part of the style.
One thing I loved about Lyx (the LaTeX What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean editor) was visual representation of the semantic meaning of that text that was unburdened by manual formatting. You couldn’t just make 20-point characters in green; you had to define your Level 1 headers to be big & green and then mark text as being a Level 1 Header, knowing that this was just how you wanted to see it while editing; the latex template would change the typography of the Level 1 Headers when rendering the document for printing or viewing.
What’s the best way to fix already styled, already formatted text in my projects, so that all text conforms to the style’s defined character attributes? I want to do what the OP is trying to prevent.
Yeah, I really like the LyX approach as well, and one can achieve a similar approach with Scrivener (setting aside the obvious differences that will result from one being rooted in LaTeX and the other in RTF), but it’s more of a disciplined approach, where in LyX one does a thing because that is how you do it, and in Scrivener one does that same thing because they choose to not use the Format Bar (except to set up and modify styles).
As for the problem you’re describing, I think most of that can be resolved using the standard Documents ▸ Convert ▸ Text to Default Formatting command (with the option to remove styles disabled naturally). This not only goes through and conforms unstyled text to the application/project default formatting for body text, it will go through and fix any recognised styled ranges and conform them to the project’s definition of what this style should look like.
Granted that tool will also try to be sensible about the kind of stuff most people would never want destroyed, like italics and highlights. So it’s more like manually applying the style in the result you get (surely both methods use the same underlying algorithm).
So I think the only way to truly knock out all formatting is through Paste and Match Style. Select the paragraph that needs to be reset, Cut and PaMS, then apply the style. That is how I prefer to paste stuff into Scrivener in general. It’s very rare I want any formatting unless it came from another place in a similar project.