Compile Question - Text Formatting Question

Scrivener
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Howdy folks, I’ve been using Scrivener for years and wrote about it repeatedly at The Mac Observer. But, I’ve come at last to the forums for some help.

I have one chapter with intercepted messages. I want those intercepted messages to be formatted differently from the rest of the text during the Compile. I figure either it’s not doable or it’s drop-dead simple, but days of trying later and I’m hoping you fine folks can help.

Thanks in advance!

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In most cases I’d suggest using a custom style for this, and mark the passages in the editor as you go. That’s pretty much all you have to worry about in the writing phase: getting the text tagged up right.

Consult §17.3.2, Creating New Styles, for a quick guide on making your own styles. As in a word processor, no need to get this right the first time around. Revisions to the formatting will be updated project-wide.

How you go compiling them follows one of two basic ideas:

  • Styles tend act like “Preserve Formatting” did in the past, as you might recall. That’s just what they do. Therefore one approach is to make it look the way they should in the output.
  • It would be a bit limiting if that is all they did however. Styles can also, like regular text, be transformed by each compile Format. This is how most of the stock starter styles will in fact work with the stock compile formats. That is how a block quote in the editor ends up looking completely different in Manuscript - Courier. So if this route appeals, for either reasons of editing preference or needing multiple formats for output (ePub vs DOCX for instance), then take a look at §24.5, Styles, in the user manual.

The other approach, for whole sections that are different, is to give this one chapter a manually created and assigned Section Type, and then just add a new Section Layout in the compiler that overrides its formatting in a different way from the Layouts used by normal chapter text. Either way will work fine, but in my opinion the styles route is probably a bit more straight-forward and efficient if you’ve just got one thing like this in the middle of the book somewhere. If half of your chapters had different formatting, then I’d definitely consider the setup time that works at the binder item level.

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Thank you kindly. I had the feeling my attempts to use a Style had simply been done wrong.

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Here is the two-styles styling advice I gave in response to a similar question recently asked here on the forum:

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And thank you kindly, too! :heart: