I’ve been using Scrivener Mac for years now, and one thing I’ve never taken time to ask—but which bugs me to no end—is why formatted text keeps resetting itself to the default “standard” appearance whenever, for example, I change the style of a paragraph. The same thing happens if I move a paragraph from one chapter to another, and perhaps in other situations.
Let’s say I have one paragraph preset called Body Lead, which starts a section flush left to the margin. All subsequent paragraphs below that use the preset Body, and those paragraphs are indented. Further, I’ll have a couple italicized book titles, and maybe a bold face word or two for emphasis within the paragraph.
Now, whenever I change a paragraph style from Body Lead to Body, or vice versa, all formatting resets itself to the default standard appearance. It’s crazy-making, since I now have to go back and reformat everything…only for it to happen all over again should I move paragraphs around.
Grateful for any help on this. I don’t see that this behavior is controlled by the Preferences, but then, there are so many it’s possible I’ve missed something that locks in formatted text. Thanks to all.
It sounds like this is owing to how you defined your paragraph presets. You probably really only wanted those presets to control some basic things like first-line indent, but when you made those presets you did it with the options set to include all the character formatting as well. The solution is to go in and redefine your presets and be sure to look at those options in the panel and uncheck things you don’t want the preset to control.
The problem (and as a developer myself, this may just be a bug—or not) is that when I craft a perfectly formatted paragraph within any paragraph style, simply redefining that style drops all previous character formatting.
The two examples I’ve attached give a good visual depiction of the issue. I start off with a Body Lead, followed by a Body.
Then decide I want to swap those styles. As you can see, all prior formatting vanishes.
But you don’t want the preset to dictate ALL the formatting. You want the preset to dictate only the Paragraph Styling and the Font and Size. So, ‘Save All Formatting’ is the wrong choice for your preset. You need to change that to ‘Save Paragraph Style’.*
-gr
Possible clarification: The talk of “saving” in the dialog refers to what sort of information is saved into (i.e. controlled by) the Preset. It is not talking about what is “saved” in the sense of “preserved” (“left untouched”) when you apply the preset.
