First of all, thank you for a wonderful program. I am so pleased that others see the distinction between processing text and writing it.
I apologize if this has been addressed elsewhere in the forms. Searching for “Quotes” failed to refine my searches.
I am an academic and find myself wanting a way to format a paragraph as a “block quote” that is, the whole paragraph indented, and potentially with a different line spacing. Is there any way to do with Scrivener? Particularly one that Word will recognize on the export?
The best way would probably be just by using OS X’s built in Styles system (built into TextEdit, Scrivener and other apps that use the Cocoa text engine).
To do this, first just format a block quote using the ruler (cmd-R to show the ruler) to indent and set the line spacing. Once you have the block quote formatting as you would like it, and ensuring that the cursor is somewhere inside your block quote, go to the Styles pop-up button in the ruler and select “Other”. Then click on the “Add to favourites” button. Supply a name for your style (e.g. “Block Quotes”) and make sure you check “include ruler as part of style” checkbox.
You will now have a block quotes style. To use it, whenever you create a quote, select it and then select your Block Quotes style from the Styles pop-up menu in the ruler to turn it into a block quote.
Note that if you are doing this sort of formatting in Scrivener, when you export using Export Draft, make sure that you un-check the “Override text formatting” button in the Formatting tab - otherwise you will lose your block quotes formatting in the outputted file. (Another option would be to include the block quote in a separate Scrivener document and just check “Preserve formatting” in the inspector for the block quotes document - that way you could still use “Override text formatting” for everything else; or you could just choose to override the font in Export Draft but not the paragraph attributes, by checking “font only”).
