I’m fairly new to Scrivener so this may be a stupid question…
I know how to change the styling for a project but I can’t work out how to effectively get different styling for different templates.
All I want is for my manuscript to be in the default (Palatino in this case) but when I open new Notes (and other templates I’ve set for character profiles) etc to be in Helvetica.
I’ve set up a default style called ‘Notes body’ which is Helvetica, and then in my templates I’ve selected this. And it works until a carriage return and then will default back to the No style/Palatino. It’s infuriating me. I don’t want to have to set the font every time.
I don’t think there’s a way to do this. If you have text in the template files, you can set the font for all of that text, and anything you type into that document will use those font (and paragraph) settings. But a blank document has no text formatting, so the first character you enter is going to follow the default for Scrivener as a whole (or the project, if you have that set under the Project->Project Settings->Formatting menu).
You could just enter a single period into any template with no text in it, and format that period. Any text entered before or after that period would inherit that formatting. Do keep in mind that if you use styles to do that, you’ll need to design the style so that the “next style” setting in that style’s configuration is itself. As far as I know, this only works with paragraph styles, not character styles.
I had some success with putting some placeholder text into the template, but it still just defaulted back after a paragraph break.
It seems the easiest way is to start writing, do a select-all and just change the font to Helvetica which then keeps for the whole doc. Just seems an unnecessary thing to have to do each time!
I’d not found anyone asking the same question by searching, but it seems like a fairly straightforward thing to me - I want to keep some visual distinction between my content and my notes. Ah well.
Adding some placeholder text to the document template, and formatting it the way you want, is the intended design here. For ease of use, select the placeholder text in its entirety, from within the template. Selection state is something duplicated into new items. Now when you create a new document from this template, you need only type over the text, rather than selecting and deleting it manually every time. It’s as painless as giving a new binder item a name.
As rdale notes, you need to update the style and use the setting at the bottom of its option panel, to have the current style carry on to the next paragraph.
That’s what I do as well for my notes entries. Since I like to interleave notes with draft material directly, it’s vital that they use a different font, so it is obvious what’s what in Scrivenings mode.
