Love Scrivener; it’s one of those (few) pieces of software that I actively look forward to using.
Thanks!
I thought to myself “Surely I can improve on ‘No Style’ - Why don’t I create and adopt a ‘Base Style’ and use/apply it everywhere (as my default) instead”.
I was successful to some degree: I wanted most to have a lightly (straw-)coloured background and no first-line indent.
But that seems to have made a mess of most of my lists… added items jump about and between Saving and re-loading, numbers and bullets seem to move and duplicate themselves:
And every new paragraph still begins with an indent; I have to apply my ‘Base Style’.
So I am pondering the wisdom of reverting to what L&L intended and change my base/Default style back to ‘No Style’.
But - is best practice to have ‘No Style’ as the ‘starting point’ for documents - unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, please?
If so, what might such good reasons be?
Can I amend just those two attributes of ‘No Style’: a background colour of my choice and no first line indent?
Would that be frowned upon? If not, what’s the best way to achieve that, please; and the best/safest way to (‘re-’)apply No Style to existing documents without loosing any other formatting (Headings, Live links, Itals, Lists etc)?
Thanks in advance for any and all advice and directions here !
Yes. We explicitly do not recommend using a “normal” style for ordinary text.
Yes. Once you’ve formatted one paragraph to look the way you want, you can use the Project → Project Settings → Formatting pane to make it the default for this project, or Scrivener → Scrivener Preferences → Editing → Formatting to make it the default Scrivener-wide.
Then, the Documents → Convert → Text to Default Formatting command will reformat existing text to the new default.
Note that you can change the “paper” color in the Editor without changing the text formatting. That’s useful because it won’t carry over to the output document. It’s the “Editor Background” setting.
I thought it would be one of the occasions when Scrivener ‘lifts’ attributes from a ‘sample’ paragraph (etc). But I couldn’t immediately get it to work:
Ignore the parts of your extract to which arrows point and click on the Make Default button at the top right of the Formatting window.
Secondly, the Options and Preferences are up to you. I would recommend you leave them unticked for your initial set up. That said, aside from your font of choices, it’s important to decide on things like indents and line spacing before setting your default formatting, as that’s the way you would generally want your work to appear most of the time. Even when those elements are set, you needn’t tick any of the Options and Preserve boxes until such time as you have alternative fonts or styles set somewhere in your work.
I wondered about that. On my system (Scrivener 3.4 on macOS 15.5) the tooltip indicates that the one at the very top right is for footnotes. So I left it and - with the paragraph still as I wanted - chose ‘Use Current’ half way down on the right.
Again - thanks .
My document is not a large one so in the end I deleted the style I’d made and went through its Texts one-by-one and amended anything which needed changing back. This also gave me an opportunity to do some tidying up.
The discussion here aside, the actual problem you are running into, with lists breaking is a known bug. So while indeed the software is designed around the notion that “no-style” = “Normal”, in most programs, you should not actually be penalised for working that way. It’s just, in most cases, more complexity than is ever needed.
which I believe I’ve fixed. It was a good exercise to go through manually and review all formatting
Now that I no longer have my spurious style, I’m pretty confident that I shall be back to normal for the future.
That crossed my mind.
But I assumed that it was due to the fact that there was confusion between the ‘new’ style which I so unwisely imposed on the text and which attempted to do away with the first-line indent and the way that I assume list indenting works, where it takes care of indents itself.
I ‘cleaned’ all my lists in BBEdit to regularize indents and bullets… seems to have worked.
I say this because - even after I had built ‘Base Style’ myself not to have an indent, I always had to overwrite whatever ‘my’ style was trying to do in addition to or instead of Scrivener’s better default.
Presumably that’s why you advise against it? I’m totally happy with that.
No, it has to do with how the compiler works with no-style text easily, and styles in Scrivener are by design a tool to force formatting through that mechanism, to some degree. The main side-effect of using a tool meant to force formatting, in scenarios where you don’t actually want that, and really do want double-spaced 12pt TNR on output, is people wasting hours of their life banging on checkboxes in the compiler, and getting frustrated because they are in effect telling the compiler to ignore everything they are trying, with their text settings.
But you can read more about this in the user manual, in the chapter on styles, in the introductory section, Think Different, if you’re interested in the theory.
Thanks for highlighting my error, Mark. My bad. I usually set formatting app wide, Scrivener → Settings → Formatting → Editing I believe on Mac, instead of project wide Project → Project Settings → Formatting.
!
