I’ve ended up with a goodly amount of text formatted with indented paragraphs, and another goodly amount with line separated paragraphs. I mostly want them all consistent. Let’s go with line separated paragraphs, so I select a block of paragraphs that are indented/no space between paragraphs. I select cntrl/cmd 0 and no change in paragraphization. Just for grins I select a block of line separated paragrphs and select ctnrl./cmd 0 again – still no change in paragraphization.
Documents > Convert > Text to default settings doesn’t seem to affect paragraphization either.
There may not be any actual formatting involved, which is why these commands are not working. I would turn invisible characters on, with View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Invisibles, and check for the presence of tabs and empty lines, respectively. Ideally you want to see one single pilcrow character (¶) at the tail end of a paragraph, and nothing on any spacing lines between, or to put it another way, if you press the right arrow key on your keyboard, it should jump from the last character on the line straight to the first character of the next paragraph. You also do not want to see any tab characters (→) where indents appear.
If you do see these, they are fortunately easy to clean up. You will find two commands in the Edit ▸ Text Tidying submenu for doing so: “Strip Leading Tabs”, and “Remove Empty Lines Between Paragraphs”.
Those are handy commands to know about – thanks! However, I still have stubborn paragraph indents. No “invisible” tab characters. I turned on rulers, put my cursor on an indented line, and the left margin is still at 0.
What I’ve ended up doing is copy/pasting the text into a plain text editor (notepad) which strips everything except ASCII text, and pasted it back in to Scrivener – now with all formatting stripped.
But I’d sure like to know a better way!
Groveling through the Edit menu I’m not seeing any ‘strip everything to the bare metal’ option.
But what is the bare metal? The obvious stuff aside (legacy control characters and such), there are quite some… let’s call them interesting characters / character combinations in Unicode that can sometimes result in unexpected software behavior. Depending on how different text engines handle them.
Or did you just search for the “Zap Gremlins” command? (Edit menu where the others are.)
Well, my trick of copy/pasting into Notepad isn’t working consistently. This last one I’ve got indented paragraphs again. And now I see the indentation marker in the ruler – my 70-year-old eyeballs simply missed it. But I don’t relish having to adjust it by hand for each and every paragraph.
I’m sure I’m missing something obvious here. Select all, then do–what?
Given that you’ve set up your preferred default in the settings (Settings… → Editing → Formatting [1]), it’s just a matter of selecting the documents you want to change and then:
You’re looking for the Paste and Match Style menu command, which is equivalent to the old Notepad.exe runaround. Do note however that the wording of this is significant. It is impossible for there to be “no formatting” in a rich text editor, so it’s going to be pasting into some kind of formatting. Significant to this case: it may well be the formatting you wanted to drop, if you merely use CtrlX to cut, and then ShiftCtrlV to Paste and Match Style.
Trying in a fresh binder item would be the safest, to avoid any potential for the original formatting remaining. If you’ve already done some colour-coding, keywords, synopses or other work on the original item, then simply position the replacement below it, and use Documents ▸ Merge.
That all said, I do agree that in most cases the command to convert formatting to default is sufficient. One ordinarily would not need to go to these lengths in the slightest. However you did specifically mention in your original post that you tried this command and it did not work. I don’t understand how that is possible, if it isn’t a case of whitespace simulating formatting. The text must be well and truly jammed from wherever it was copied from, and thus I would be doing what I could to completely clean it out—to just have letters and punctuation like you said, on the clipboard.
