You can’t, because color is a character attribute and emphasis is a character style. If that was the question all along, I badly misunderstood.
To make it possible, they’d need a more complicated definition/redefinition process with more checkboxes: ones for highlighting, color, and face in addition to the (already confusing for some people) options they’ve given. If they did that, the extra flexibility would not carry over to Word compiles and might not be compatible with the RTF specification, either.
I’m sorry if I was unclear; by the time I went through the thread, several questions had cropped up, so I was attempting to address them on the way and explain why the dialogues were different, that it wasn’t down to a specific OS version or such as had been suggested in some other post.
To your point: Neither box offers this option; text colour is saved as part of the character attributes and is always included in any style that includes character attributes; in other words, it is not part of a paragraph-only style but will always be part of either of the others.
You cannot do this with Scrivener’s current styles system. Thus my suggestion to create a revision mode style to maintain the revision colour. Working with the original (black) Emphasis style, you could instead:
Assign a keyboard shortcut to “Mark Revised”, then use that to quickly reassign your current revision mode colour to the selected text after applying the style.
⌘X to cut the selected text before applying the style, then toggle on the style (a shortcut would also be handy here) and use ⌥⇧⌘V (Paste and Match Style) to re-insert the text with emphasis and the current revision mode colour.
And ‘Paste and match style’ does exactly that, which is it matches the style of the sentence one is pasting into, meaning it will remove the Emphasis since the rest of the sentence doesn’t have Emphasis.
I tried it. It put me right back where I started, which was with a word with no Emphasis.
Well, of course. I changed a single word by adding Emphasis. I deleted that word and then pasted it back in using Paste and match style, and the Emphasis was gone.
It sounds like it doing exactly what it says – matching the existing style – but it matches formatting, not styles per se, though. If you deleted the Emphasized word, Emphasis was no longer there.
I would never suggest it, because I know what it does. I could do something along those lines with a Keyboard Maestro macro, but it might be a different macro for each color.
But revision colors is a brilliant idea by Keith B. I use them all the time for lots of different purposes, and I think they actually can help writers reach that first goal.
Even more brilliant? (again thanks to Keith) I can leave the revision colors in the manuscript forever, because there is an option to fix all text to black during compile, and to make it monochrome in composition mode.
Scrivener is truly an amazing program, unparalleled. I just wish it had this ability to not change the color of words that I add Emphasis to.
You just need to change the order of what you’re doing. Cut the word first, then apply the style; it acts similarly to toggling on bold or italic, so that the following text you write will take on that formatting. Without moving the insertion point, then use Paste and Match Style to re-insert the text. It will then pick up that emphasis style, as well as using the current revision mode colour (this assumes that you are currently in revision mode, so that text you’re typing in the editor is using that colour.)
You’ll find this under Format ▸ Revision Mode ▸ when you have selected text that is not the current revision colour.
I find it very surprising because that may be the most nonintuitive thing I’ve ever seen in Scrivener. Who could ever guess that you could delete a word and then apply a character style to it after the fact? One would assume that to apply a character style you would have to have a word selected in the text. But this apparently applies it to whatever you have on the clipboard!
Now if I can just make that a routine in Automator.
As for Format > Revision Mode, I am not seeing ‘Mark Revised’ anywhere. What I get is this:
As I said, the character style here is working similarly to the way toggling italics, bold, highlighting, etc. works in Scrivener and many word processors—you can apply it to selected text or you can toggle it on and then begin writing using that formatting. So that’s what you’re doing here, but instead of typing you’re using Paste and Match Style, which is like typing in that it just picks up the current formatting—in this case that switched on by the style—rather than coming from the clipboard with its own formatting intact. It’s pretty handy when you have shortcuts applied for the styles for switching into and out of a style while typing, the way you can with ⌘I and ⌘B.
Hm, does your focussed editor have a non-purple text selection in it? It needs to be a selection of text that isn’t already marked as second revision.
Apparently what it needs is a selection. If I select revised text, or text that is not revised (has no revision color), or a combination where part of it is revised and part of it isn’t, then ‘Mark Revised’ appears.
If I just have the cursor placed and there is nothing selected, then it says Remove Current Revision Color. That’s also confusing as hell, because you can’t remove a revision color when there isn’t any text selected.
When there is no selection, Remove Current Revision Color will remove it from all the text in the editor. It’s similar to tools like Edit ▸ Text Tidying ▸ Replace Multiple Spaces with Single Space; it works on the selection if there is one, or the full text if not.
Well, that is also good to know. What I’ve been doing is selecting all text in a document when I want to remove all revision color, and then invoking that command. Apparently, that’s not necessary.
This is a lot of good information. Have you ever thought of starting your own YouTube channel? Most of the YouTube information on Scrivener is not all that great.
