Default formatting in the editor and making indents even

Hello all,

I’ve been writing off and on for most of my life. Since I went electronic, I’ve been using Word. I have a couple of works for which I needed something more, and I found an excellent set of organizational tools in Scrivener. Writing individual stories or articles is easy; what I want now is to organize all that into a more cohesive final project.

Last night I spent some time organizing sections for one of these works and importing Word files. By and large, this was a fruitful exercise, except for some minor formatting quirks. Scrivener did some funny things with paragraph indents, adding additional tabs where the Word files have none. It’s not hard to go in and tweak that manually, but I wonder if there’s an easier way.

I should probably add that I don’t apply Style templates in Word. I’m not averse to Styles, mind you, just a child of the typewriter era where style and formatting tools were primitive at best. Would formatting my Word file with a particular Style help me import into Scrivener more smoothly?

Also, what are the hive mind’s thoughts on using Word vs. Scrivener as my native writing app? Some of Word’s features (especially Comments and/or Footnotes) are useful for documenting feedback on a particular draft. I also find it useful to keep Word files around to archive older drafts. You never know, maybe I remove something that I later want to keep. Could I achieve the same thing with Snapshots and/or exports of particular sections to Word?

There is a lot more I could type, but perhaps this is enough. Special apologies to all for the ramble. I’ve done the built in tutorial, and have run through a few on Youtube as well. Heck, I’ll probably go through them again. In buying Scrivener, I’ve acquired a massive multi-drawer tool chest, and so far I’ve only opened a few drawers. I look forward to exploring more, and I imagine I’ll have more questions as I go!

Erik

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Scrivener did some funny things with paragraph indents, adding additional tabs where the Word files have none. It’s not hard to go in and tweak that manually, but I wonder if there’s an easier way.

There is a good tool for cleaning up the stuff you’ve imported. This knowledge base article has the details. In short though you can save reformatting for after you’ve got everything in, and then clean it all up at once.

That won’t fix everything though, as there are some things that don’t fall within its purview. For example, if by “tabs” you mean literally that, the character that gets inserted when press the Tab key on your keyboard—that isn’t formatting in the sense of something that a preset look can change, more like how a paragraph break works, it’s something we call a “control character”, in that it is a literal character like a visible letter, that you can delete or type in, that controls how the text behaves. If you do have a mix of tabs and natural indents (from formatting), you can clean things up with the Edit ▸ Text Tidying ▸ Strip Leading Tabs menu command.

One other thing you might be meaning is that Scrivener’s default settings do indeed indent each paragraph. I believe Word’s default is still more of a “web look”: paragraph spacing with no indents. It’s up to you what sort of environment you want to write in though. Unlike Word, the appearance of text in the editor is largely up to personal taste—it won’t print that way unless you tell it to. As you’ve explored in the tutorial, it shows how when you compile it can all be cleaned up to a standard look without having to do much of anything yourself.

So make the paragraphs look like you want, and use the Format ▸ Make Formatting Default menu command.

I should probably add that I don’t apply Style templates in Word. I’m not averse to Styles, mind you, just a child of the typewriter era where style and formatting tools were primitive at best. Would formatting my Word file with a particular Style help me import into Scrivener more smoothly?

You should get along with Scrivener’s basic mode of operation just fine, in that regard. It in fact works best without wall-to-wall styling, and will even ignore common default paragraph styles (not the formatting, to be clear, just the style assignment).

Some of Word’s features (especially Comments and/or Footnotes) are useful for documenting feedback on a particular draft.

While Scrivener has those, and can import and export them using standard methods, how you handle getting notes from others is more of a personal choice. Myself, I prefer working from a list of notes, and cross-referencing them to the original text in Scrivener, making edits as I see fit. Others prefer to carry on how they worked in word processors a bit more, in that they’d rather the annotated document become their source text.

There are pros and cons to either, for me the cons are too steep: chiefly in that trashing my entire Draft folder and replacing it with an imported copy would mean having to use Scrivener at a very basic level—no labels to track stuff, no notes-to-self in the inspector or synopsis, no internal links between things to highlight relationships—basically all of the things you would do outside of the text editor get lost when working that way.

But, if you don’t really use much of that, it’s probably easier than opening the notes in one split and looking up the original in another.

Others dodge the quandary altogether and consider a Scrivener project done, once it gets to the point of getting feedback and doing final revisions. They’ll compile one last time, move on to Word, and archive the project.

I also find it useful to keep Word files around to archive older drafts. You never know, maybe I remove something that I later want to keep. Could I achieve the same thing with Snapshots and/or exports of particular sections to Word?

Snapshots are probably what you’re looking for here. It’s a tool that works within Scrivener’s ethos however, of breaking long text up into smaller pieces. You only preserve the part you’re working on when you take a snapshot, rather than having a full duplicate of a large section, for the sake one edit somewhere inside of it.

Welcome to Scrivener, and the forum! The search tool here is pretty good, and you should have many years of discussions on methods, as well as technical answers to questions.

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Scrivener can probably accomplish all you want. You can add comments and annotation and include or not if you export to word for review.
You need to set default font, size, paragraph indent, line spacing and can do this in Project Settings, formatting. You can copy from a file you have set up the way you like. Don’t worry too much about this as you can change when you compile and export your work. (Warning in scrivener default settings=No Style).
Once set up import word documents, highlight the files you want to change and then use Documents>Convert>Text to Default Formatting.
Look at the webinars, and videos on this site to help. the forums here are very valuable and there are some inexpensive books to help you learn. I made a project just for learning and add material as I go forward. Scrivener also has a built in tutorial and very large manual to look up fine details as well.
You don’t have to learn it all at once, but it has amazing tools that can be adapted to your unique style.

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Thank you both! I think my biggest thing is just to dive in and get my feet wet, allowing myself to learn as I go. You’ve given me some useful tips to direct my learning!

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Just last night I put some of your specific feedback to use, especially setting up format defaults and stripping leading tabs. That was MUCH faster than tweaking every single indent manually! I was happy that I didn’t have to scrap one project and start over, as I’ve already started organizing it into sections, building simple templates (characters and starships), etc. I like that you don’t have to have all your defaults and presets finalized before you build a project. Instead, you can tweak as your preferences change and/or you learn the software better.

This was especially handy with a second project that contains dozens of files; I could set my defaults, then apply en masse. I’m sure I will have to massage paragraph indents and the like, but I can deal with that. The original files didn’t have the tightest formatting anyway.

Also, I was happy that Scrivener’s default is “No Style.” If I could change one thing I’d make the default font size 12 point instead of 11 point, but that’s not so bad. And maybe it’s there but I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Thank you for the feedback, and I’m glad I found this software!

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You can change the formatting defaults globally (for all projects) via File > Options > Editing > Formatting or locally (for a specific project) via Project > Project Settings > Formatting.

Then set your default font size in the formatting pane:

Is that what you were looking for?

Best,
Jim

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If that is what you want (@JimRac’s answer), you then need to convert already existing documents to that new default formatting afterwards:
Once you’ve done as instructed above,
in the binder select all of your pre-existing documents you wish to use this new formatting, then
Document/Convert/Text to Default Formatting

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@Jedi_Bail : I like that you don’t have to have all your defaults and presets finalized before you build a project. Instead, you can tweak as your preferences change and/or you learn the software better.

Quite right! I think you’ll find that in general that is something we try to design toward—the idea that it should be very difficult to make mistakes that require extensively redoing your work. Files can be turned into folders and vice versa, so you don’t even have to make up your mind as you build up your outline. What we think of as “chapters” can become “parts” if the book grows. It’s very hard to paint yourself into a corner, and Styles make that all the more true if you make use of them.

If I could change one thing I’d make the default font size 12 point instead of 11 point, but that’s not so bad. And maybe it’s there but I just haven’t figured it out yet.

That is what I referred to above with using the Format ▸ Make Formatting Default menu command. Just make the text look like you want it to in the editor, and use that command! It’s entirely up to you what “no style” should look like.

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That should be what I’m looking for; will have to check when I get home. I’ll let you know; thank you!

P.S. This will sound silly, but one of the defaults I can’t make up my mind for is what font to use. I keep waffling between Garamond and Times New Roman, both of which are recommended for compiling to e-books (my eventual goal with at least one of my projects). Being able to make changes so easily means I can keep on waffling! :crazy_face:

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Compiling lets you choose what you want once, when you are ready for it. The editor font, sizes, etc. are for you to write with. Compile allows you to work in comic sans and turn out a document in times roman for publishing purposes. Or later, in Garamond without needing to change anything if what you wrote.

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You can also write some documents in Garamond and some in Times, then normalize to whichever you decide you prefer.

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I personally tend to write in fonts that resemble handwritten documents or something like Bookman Old Style or Baskerville. I’m also a fan of using colored text for each round of drafting and revision.

Letting compile change those writing preferences so that my output meets industry standards is the biggest reason I gave Scrivener a try in the first place. I’ve stayed all these years for all the other extras it added to my workflow.

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Something to bear in mind is that 99.9% of the time the font you select when compiling with have nothing at all to do with what an ebook reader shows (an individual reader might prefer sans serif fonts, or the dyslexia-friendly one). And in fact, Scrivener even deliberately goes out of its way to strip out all font family declarations from the CSS, because that is aligned with many vendors’ submission policies—and even where it is not, since it is largely ignored, it’s just a waste of bytes to be saying “Times New Roman” over and over in a text file.

So with ebooks more than anything else, you can worry far less about font families while writing.

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I know this conversation comes up regularly, but I always use a monospaced typewriter style font precisely so it looks like an old fashioned typewritten draft and not like the finished output.

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I am finding that, because of pasting from notes in other formats, I end up with some paragraphs indented and some not. I would like to be able to tell the entire manuscript - or at least an entire page - to indent every paragraph by 5 spaces.

I have not been able to find how to do that. I manually did that for an entire page and tried to save that as a formatting preset, but when I applied it to a different page, everything was applied except the indent.

Thanks for any clues.

image

Once you’ve formatted a paragraph to your taste, you can copy & paste that formatting to any paragraph you wish.

But… as far as indents go, we can’t be talking tabs. Tabs are not indents. They are a character, and a bad habit.
Just sayin’, in case that is actually what you meant. :wink:

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  1. In File → Options → Editing → Formatting set your default paragraph with the indent you require on the ruler, or if you find it easier, put your cursor in a paragraph that is set up how you want and then in that Options pane click “Use Formatting in Current Editor”.

  2. To set all existing text to that default, select all documents in Draft/Manuscript in the Binder and use Documents → Convert → Text to Default Formatting…

  3. Edit → Text Tidying → Strip Leading Tabs

  4. For all text copied from other sources, use Edit → Paste and Match Style rather than simple Paste.

:smiley:
Mark

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Also, see previously: a guide on how default formatting works, how to change it, and how to update existing text to conform to it.

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Mark,
Thank you very much. Those were exactly the tricks I needed.
John

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I am sorry I don’t know the word in english, but I am trying to set up my document so that when I press enter it does not automatically do a space before the new line. I want all rows to start at the same position. I go and change it under format, but it goes right back to making the space again. Please help.