Hi all, I’ve tried to find this, I truly have.
When I select a section of text as Block Quote, it is double spaced in my document. I can’t change it to single space by highlighting it. I’d like all my block quotes to be single-spaced. How do I do that?
When I open the Redefine Style box I don’t see any way to change attributes like line spacing.
Thanks…
Are you wanting to change the line spacing in the Editor, or in your compiled output?
Thanks for the reply! I’d like to permanently change the format for block quotes.
You first have to change the line spacing from double to single in one paragraph that has the paragraph style Blockquote.
You can do that in the Format Bar with its second to the right icon (it is probably set to 2.0, you can change it to 1.0—besides, I’d recommend to try 1.2 or 1.3). If the Format Bar is not visible you can turn it on by Via/Text Editing/Show Format Bar. Click into the Blockquote paragraph and change everything you want to change.
Then, with the cursor still in that paragraph, go to the style picker at the left of the Format Bar and click Show Styles Panel at the bottom. The style Block Quote in must still be selected. Then click on the gear icon on the bottom and click Redefine Paragraph Style from Selection.
Depending on what you change you will go for either All formatting or just Paragraph style and may tick the font related boxes.
Then click OK and Scrivener will ask you if you really want to change all Blockquote paragraphs. Which you do.
Regarding to what @rms wrote: You should be aware that the text settings in the Editor can be (but don’t have to be) totally different to the text settings in the compiled output.
EDIT: Corrected instructions thanks to @Vincent_Vincent.
All good except for a tiny detail:
This above part is erroneous.
Clicking a style in the styles panel would revert the paragraph to its previous state.
You have to tweak the paragraph with the style already selected in the panel, then redefine the style, or, do as explained, but instead of going through the styles panel, use the menu, that allows to select the style without applying it to the current paragraph:
Any which way, the style should be already selected (on its own) in the styles panel if the cursor is in the concerned paragraph. (I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t, other than the user being in the process of redefining a style by using a paragraph that is of a different style as a starting point. – Which, by the way, can’t be done using the styles panel’s bottom menu (you need to right click the target style for that.))
So the general idea is that you never actually tweak the formatting of a style. You rather tweak a paragraph (or chunk of text) and then redefine the (or a) style from that.
There is also no confirmation dialog. (In the windows version, the least.)
Else, as it implies though, keep in mind that redefining a style changes the formatting of all paragraphs of that style everywhere across your whole project.
You are absolutely right. I have corrected my previous post to not mislead anybody.
I don’t know about the Windows version but the Scrivener on the Mac does have a confirmation prompt… unless it has been switched off for good:
Ah. (My bad.)
I guess I must have clicked
and long forgot…
@pdean hi,
Just a heads up: I find it saves a lot of hassle if a general paragraph style like Blockquote are set to “Save paragraph style” with the “Font family” and “Font size” switched off. That way, they will use the font, size etc. set in your default “No Style”, whether that is set generally through Preferences/Options or for a specific project through Project → Project settings, and also you don’t end up having to sort things out on Compile if you’re compiling to a different font family. Headings, I set font size and variant—basically Semibold/Bold—but not family.
Basically, for me, the only paragraph style I would set with a specific font family is Code Block… if I ever needed it.
Mark
Undeniably true.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I have those checked only for a few styles, where I use the font as a mean for the text to stand out, mostly in the early phase of the creation process of a novel. For e.g. to tell apart what are notes, what is an outline, ideas, etc. Useful if you work with printouts, since all color cues are unusable if printing in B&W.
(Note that I don’t use the synopsis panel at all, and the notes panel not so much, as it is rather general notes for a document. I prefer to do everything in the editor, as I can precisely have those – notes, ideas, whatever – right where they would otherwise refer to.)
So the general idea would be to not check those two
unless you have a specific reason to.
As a matter of fact, they are both checked by default when creating a new style, where, in my opinion, they shouldn’t. (But that is another topic.)
I would suggest there is no need to redirect the OP to call up the style panel to get the job done (extra work!). They were doing fine calling on the Redefine menu item – they just hadn’t prepped the paragraph before doing it.
Thank you suavito and vincent!
So I’ve figured out that text actually is single-space in my block quote, but hitting return creates a double space. (My block quote is a list, so I had to keep typing to the end of the line to learn that it was single space.)
Is there a style for returns that’s overriding the block quote?
I’m in Mac version 3.2.3.
That is space before/after.
(Windows screenshots)
And yes, that saves with the paragraph style’s formatting.
Select one of your block quotes, fix this, then redefine the style.
Perfect. Thanks so much, you two!
If you encountered your problem because the quoted material itself has embedded returns (for multi paragraph or a listing), then the usual answer is to use linefeed characters not carriage returns within the blockquote. (In this way you could retain the space-after at the very end of the Blockquote paragraph.)
Anytime you’re getting weird formatting behavior, it’s also a good idea to turn on View → Text Editing → Show Invisibles.
Thanks, kewms. And gr, after years of typesetting and word processing, I get to learn something new: I’ve never heard of linefeed characters.
Well, that’s fun. Often referred to as a newline character, because of how it is interpreted by text editors — namely going to a new line without terminating the logical paragraph — the LF character is good to know! Different apps keycode it differently (which is unusual for low level character typing). Scrivener on MacOS uses cmd-Return, but Word puts it under shift-Return or opt-Return (I can’t remember which).
Thanks, gr! Can’t wait to try it out.
