I want to create a Preset style, and my Scrivener for Dummies says to select text and format it (done) and then “Choose Format>Formatting>New Preset from Selection.” But under Format, I do not have a Formatting option. Help?
Formatting Presets don’t exist in the Windows version at present. What you could do is create a reference document in the binder and set it up with sample text in the different formats you want to use, then use Format > Font > Copy/Paste Font or Format > Text > Copy/Paste Ruler to apply those to other text in your project.
Keep in mind also that in many cases, you don’t really need to do much formatting in the editor at all, but can save that for compile. This differs from project to project, of course, but if you’re just getting started with Scrivener and coming from a mindset of Word’s style sheets and so on to set up your novel draft, you may want to rethink how much you really need those at this stage. Titles, title prefixes, etc. can all be added during compile and formatted separate from the main text, for instance, so you don’t need to add those to your documents and then have to format them appropriately in the editor. In some cases where you do need to apply fancy formatting to sections of main text, you might more easily use a stripped down version that you can then use as a hook after compiling to swap out that basic formatting for the complete version in Word using a simple find/replace.
We do have plans for adding saved formatting presets in version 2, but those are just some ideas for the meanwhile.
Thanks for the explanation, MM. My problem is that my project involves lots of different components–poems by 2 different students, notes to and from the teacher, and running text. So I need clearly defined styles for each of those. And if I have to manually change it for each bit of text…what a pain. If I get all 37 poems, say, defined one way, and then I decide to tweak the style, I have to manually change all 37 poems. I am very frustrated. But…I appreciate the reference document suggestion. I’m new to Scrivener and will try that right away. It might save at least a couple of steps…
Thanks!
If you’re planning to format each type of section the same–all poems will have the same formatting (or all poems by a particular student), all teacher’s notes will have the same formatting, etc–I think this would be a good cadidate for using a really simple formatting “hook” in Scrivener to identify the types, then do the heavy lifting after compile in Word. For instance, if you make all of student A’s poems in red text, all of student B’s in blue text, and all teacher’s notes in green text, then when you compile and open in Word, you can simply select some of the blue text, right-click and choose Styles > Select All Text With Similar Formatting, and then apply a style. Bam, you’re done, all student B’s poems have the same fancy formatting. If you decide to change it, just repeat the steps in Word.
Besides letting you easily update the final formatting as you need to, this also helps keep the formatting separate from the drafting. SInce you’re working with poetry, I realise that may be a bit off, since for much poetry the formatting is as much a part of the meaning of the poem as the words and rhythm, but since you indicated that all the poems will be formatted identically, I thought it might work in this case. Even if you need a bit more while drafting, if you can simplify the formatting for the poems to their bare bones, the text colour hook will still allow you to more easily update the rest of the styling in Word.
Unique text colour isn’t the only option for the format hook, but it’s a simple one; you could use different fonts or different font sizes and choose not to override that when you compile (deselect “Override text and notes formatting” in the Formatting tab of Compile, or just choose the “Original” preset from the Format As drop-down menu). If you try the text colour option, make sure that when you compile you deselect “Remove text color” in the Transformations tab.