I have a folder of documents in Scrivenings view. When I select all and choose “No Style” from the Styles list, nothing is happening. Bold stays bold, italic stays italic. Attempts to set font to bold or not bold, italic to not italic… non of these actions result in any change to the text.
Yes I have attempted to save my project and shut down, and restart Scrivener… but same problem persists. I have deflected and reselected. I have brought new documents into edit view and then gone back to the docs I want to edit the style of. Nothing works.
Is a Style assigned to the text in the first place? (The Format bar will tell you.)
A “Style,” in Scrivener, is a named collection of settings applied to a range of text. Simply selecting the text and marking it Bold does not apply a Style.
(This is actually similar usage to Word. You can freely apply character formatting while the affected text remains “Normal.”)
The “Convert to Default Formatting” command is the one to use if you want to normalize (unStyled) text to your project default.
No style predefined. None at all. Text was pasted in from plaintext document. Should it matter? Shouldn’t I be able to change any text to no style? Or any other style or font or font setting.
If the text is already marked as “no style,” but has added bold (or other) formatting, then it still doesn’t have a “style” in the sense of my definition up above.
To remove the formatting, select the text and turn the formatting off. To do this at scale, use the document level “Convert to Default Formatting” command.
If you are unable to change the formatting of the text at all, something is wrong. Please open a support ticket, here, including a project with the relevant file: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/contact-us
This problem isn’t limited to choosing the “No Style” option. Is true of any selected style. It is also true of using any of the font or font styles options no matter where they are accessed in the Scrivener App (here on a variety of Apple Macintosh computers all running MacOS 15.3.1).
As seen in this screenshot, all text selected (single document in primary editor) appears to be in bold, italic, and underline. But none of those icons are highlighted in the text format bar. As the screenshot below shows, using the Documents/Convert/Text to default formatting… command does nothing.
Same is true when I select all of the documents within a folder. Same is true when I select the folder containing these documents, enter Scrivenings mode, select all text in the editor, and attempt to change formatting settings with icons in the formatting bar, or with the Convert/Text to default formatting… command.
Text is editable. But Scrivener will not allow me to change its formatting.
Also, I have saved and quit Scrivener, and re-launched the project… problem persists exactly as before.
This text was either typed directly into the editor, or was copied from a plaintext document (from TextEdit).
Am I to understand that choosing No Style, from Styles is equivalent to choosing Convert/Text to Default Formatting from the Documents menu?
Should these commands work on selected binder documents and folders (with all of their enclosed documents)?
Should these commands also work on text selected across multiple documents in Screenings view?
I realize that Styles is a paragraph wide setting where Font Styles work according to character string selections. But none of this seems to matter in the situation I am working with as neither Styles settings or Font Styles seem to do anything to remove the weird (sort of bold) style that the text is displayed in.
Update. After a great many trial and error attempts to find a way to solve this problem, I have somehow (don’t actually know how) been able to fix the problem (temporarily?).
As indicated above, Scrivener’s refusal to allow me to change the font or style settings for selected text or selected documents, was only true of the document within a single binder folder but was absolute. The text could be edited in any of these documents, in either single doc editor or in the Scrivenings editor. I attempted to set the style from the format tool bar, from the various menu items, after selecting text or selecting the documents in the binder. Nothing worked.
Until, and I have no idea if this was the result of any series of prior actions, I tried again to set the style of selected text to another style type (I arbitrarily tried Style/Heading 1), which both changed all selected paragraphs to the indicated style, but then correctly FINALLY responded to my choosing Style/No Style correctly removing all style from the text. Looks like Scrivener refuses to respond to a Style setting request if the style I am asking it to set my text to is the style it thinks the text is already set to?
It should be noted here that the documents in question were created through the set new documents to template settings for the particular binder folder in question. I asked for a new document, then I pasted in text generated by a ShortCuts automation Service I have written using ShortCuts native Text Actions. The text being pasted in is simpleText (not RTF). I am doing this to reformat special idea items for my glossary/Index, my bibliography, my list of quotations, my acknowledgments, my illustrations/photos/figures index, and my timeline index, and my locations index. This way, all entries for each of these indices are identically formatted as individual documents within specified folders ready for appropriate compile settings.
PS. Scrivener does not seem (ever) to allow one to apply a style to whole documents or folders of documents (only works with an active selection of text).
There is a “Convert/Text to Default Formatting…” command in the “Documents” menu, but I am confused as to what this means when compared to the “No Style” Style option.
“Style/No Style” is an option for paragraphs and is only available when text is selected in an editor.
“Documents/Convert/Text to Default Formatting…” is an option for documents and is available only when documents are selected in the binder.
But what they do to the target text or document… is it the same? Is “No Style” equivalent to “Default Formatting”? Is “No Style” something other than “Default Formatting”? If they are the same thing, wouldn’t it be best to use the same vernacular, the same UI for both? If they are different, how are they different?
Again, a “Style” is a named set of settings applied to a chunk of text. It can include any formatting, or none, the key aspect is that it is a label. Because of that, you can change the Style specification and every piece of text with that label in your manuscript will change. You might have a Block Quote style, say, and decide that block quotes should have 1.25 line spacing instead of single spacing. Change the Style, and it changes everywhere. Remove the Style, and you remove the label.
(This last is very important in the context of Scrivener’s post-processing. You can use a Style to pass instructions like “index item” through to other software, even if there is no visible formatting at all.)
The Default Formatting is not a Style. If you change it, you have to explicitly change existing text to make it match. Bold or italic or double-space or Comic Sans 14 pt is not, in itself, a Style, it’s just formatting applied to a block of text.
So “No Style” means that no Style label has been applied to the text. It does not necessarily mean that the text reflects the project-wide default formatting.
Without looking at the project, I’m not going to speculate on what the situation might have been. Again, you’re welcome to open a support ticket.
Philosophically, Scrivener does not use a “body” or “normal” style. The idea is that most text should be unstyled, and therefore applying a single style to many documents at once is not recommended (or supported).
