If we can already do this, apologies: I’ve been searching through the forums and playing around with various things and I can’t make this work.
If I change a preset formatting style, can all already-created instantiations of that style change to match the new format? For example, if I have the “Quotation” style that’s 12 pt Times italic with left and right margins set to give me a 4 inch column of text and I change it to be 14 pt Helvetica bold with a 5 inch column of text, currently I have to select every single bit of text that’s currently formatted as “Quotation” and reapply the Quotation formatting to it.
I know Scrivener isn’t a formatting program, but I do enough formatting in there that I’d really like to be able to change a style and see it reappear everywhere that style already exists.
Styles are not “persistent” in Scrivener. Applying your ‘Quotation’ style to a paragraph just sets the various style settings for you that you know. There is no internal marker that tags the paragraph as belonging now to a named style. So, there is no way for Scrivener to later pick out the paragraphs that you think of as belonging to the ‘Quotation’-style group.
–Greg
P.S. I made key commands for my favorite paragraph presets, and that makes reapplying them pretty easy.
Yeah, this is one of those areas where the rule of thumb you stated, that it isn’t a formatting program, is true. I would say the most important thing in Scrivener is keeping things as consistent as possible, even if they are “wrong” for the final format. That way, you can always transition things over to a word processor that is capable of searching by style and apply stylesheets. Then you can take it from there in a layout biased program.
I use presets, but for me they are purely visual hints so that rapidly scanning through text is easier on the eye. They don’t in any way resemble the final output (or even get used). I use custom shortcuts as well, that’s a very useful trick.
If you’ve got a good word processor that can handle what I described above, you might consider working that way. It’s a bit odd, but totally non-print formatting, like bold red text for italics, makes proofing really easy.