File/Options/Editing/Formatting could use a Style to set the default formatting for Main text style.
File/Options/Editing/Formatting could use a Style to set the default formatting for Main text style.
No, because a majority of text is supposed to have No style, only direct formatting (italics, bold, underline).
I think this is explained in the interactive tutorial.
Yeah that would be the wrong way around. The default text formatting that you are setting up here is the default style. Using a style to set the default style would be… weird. It also wouldn’t work too well considering each project can have its own radically different stylesheet, and the Options pane governs global settings. Another project may not even have the style you chose as “main”.
Having a default ‘Normal’ style is the way Word and InDesign work. Having inline styles is considered amateurish. And it feels that way too. What’s wrong with every Stylesheet having a ‘Normal’ style? In the exceptional case it doesn’t the inline styles could be copied into this default style.
Imho, this is not ‘weird’. It is basic text editing. Don’t treat your users as amateurs. Give them professional editing software.
Which version of Scrivener are you using?
If it’s V1.9, then you can be content that a full styles system in included in V3 (now in late beta).
If you are using the beta, then unfortunately your post shows that you have failed to understand some basic elements of the design or how to use them, which is causing you unnecessary problems. The styles design makes one of Scrivener’s key features (compilation to multiple formats without changing the text you edit) possible. It also looks like that you don’t realise how to set the default style for each project, which means that a ‘Normal’ style equivalent is, in fact, available, if that’s how you want to think of it.
Please explain what you are trying to do, and what problems you experiencing and we’ll try to help you.
No, it’s the way Word and InDesign work, because that was one of the big inovations when Word 1.0 emerged back in the MS-DOS times. It was a deliberate design choice made by Microsoft. But styles are not a general feature of all text editing.
Scrivener has, as a result of a very deliberate design choice, a very different basic design in which styles are not the rule but the exception. Scrivener is not a wysiwyg layout software, it’s an authoring software where the text may look quite different when you write compared to the final output after Compile.
Have you done the tutorial?
“Styles” have nothing to do with text editing, they are exclusively an aspect of design. A “basic text editor” accepts no formatting at all.
Word and InDesign don’t do what Scrivener does. They are different applications with different goals.
Katherine
It’s worth noting that you have misread what I wrote. I did not refer to the use of style sheets having a base default style in general as weird. What was being proposed would be like having “Normal” in Word’s Normal.dot file being redefined on the fly by every .docx file you opened, using that specific document’s attribution for the “Normal” style.
You were suggesting something based on your experience with traditional design-oriented programs, which is fine, but as others have pointed out above, these are fundamentally different software packages you’ve listed. This is chiefly a writing program, aim at writers, not designers.
Styling is not important to every writer out there. It is something that some writers do need, and so it is provided as an optional feature that works on top of a style-less system. For those, like novelists, biographers and so on, that need styles as much as they need Photoshop, it is a system that can be completely ignored, and thus never present itself as part of the learning curve.
Meanwhile, for those diehard ardent stylists that feel uncomfortable with unstyled text, it is perfectly suitable to consider “No Style” as being “Normal”. In all aspects of how it functions, its capabilities of being malleable and abstracted from design, it works precisely the same as styled text. In editing form, it is hierarchically attributed from global settings (i.e. Normal.dot), that can be optionally overruled by individual projects, which can further be diverted into classical “Normal” assignments on the fly for those tools that need it, or in every other way be transformed by output settings, in the phase we refer to as compiling. In some ways it is far more powerful than styled text.
So thanks for your suggestion, but this is a tool for all kinds of writers, from kids to amateurs to hobbyists to professionals. We assume nothing, and we have no pretences of our own that might exclude any group of writers from using it. It is also designed to scale well into professional use cases and into technical niche scenarios, an area that incidentally many packages aimed at “pros” often ignore (like technical DocBook publishing and scientific work using LaTeX).