I’m writing a novel. I want to re-format the text of the story but not that of the chapter headings. Can I select the entire novel, then deselect the chapter headings, leaving the story text selected and available for re-formatting?
It sounds like your entire novel is in a single document in the Scrivener Binder?
I ask because the “Scrivener like” way to accomplish this task would be to use one document (at least) for each chapter, and make the chapter heading the document title. Then it’s easy, because the headings aren’t part of the text. If the headings are part of the text, one way to do it would be to assign a style to the headings but not to the text, then change the style. (Which is how Word does it.)
1 Like
Mass selection doesn’t really work that way. And the mobile version doesn’t really do what you’re trying to ask of it. That said, there is a way Scrivener can do something like it.
While I am the last one to ask how they work, you can use Styles to do this for your exported product.
I stipulate that I am advocating for the use of a mechanism that I don’t generally use, nor understand well. Hopefully one of the other regulars can help more.
You posted this to the iOS forum, so if you are using Scrivener on iPhone or iPad this feature isn’t available there. The mobile version lacks much of the formatting power as the full fledged version.
There really isn’t a good way to build Chapter headers in iOS without staging them manually which is why you are running into the troubles that you are.
If you were to load your project into the desktop version, you could select the Heading, then define a style from selection.
Then all you would need to do is to apply that style to every heading. You can then set the rest of your document to the ‘body’ style and then adjust that in the compile settings as you’d like.
Again, this is a feature I’m not skilled at, nor use all that much, but it is one of the powerful features under the hood. You can compose to your hearts content on mobile (I do), then with a few seconds of tinkering compile a finished manuscript with the latest and greatest fonts and styling you want on that future day.
Yes. Thanks. That works. Actually it’s the story text I need to reformat but that works there as well. I reformat the first chapter then use the same format as I select the text in between the headings. Not as fast as if I could deselect selectively (haha) but same end result.