Formatting Block Quotes: something more involved?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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For academic writing, I have so far been exporting Scrivener material into Pages for some final tidying up, but this is an awkward workflow, and I wondered if it was possible to do what I want entirely within Scrivener and export directly to PDF.

The main problem at the moment is Block Quotes. My requirements for formatting are more or less as follows:

*Main text in 12 pt, double spaced.
*Block quote in 10 pt, double spaced, with smaller margins, and custom spacing before the first line of the quote of 10pt, with 12 pt afterwards. All in-quote spacing should be regular 10pt double-spaced.

I often quote dialogue and text that runs over from one paragraph to the next. This messes up the formatting, as each new line (ie carriage return) is treated as a new paragraph.

The other issue is that of indentation of the main text line immediately following the quote. There should only be an indent when the line after the quote begins a new paragraph, but often it does not. Scrivener seems to automatically indent.

Margins I can do! But is there an easy way to deal with the above issues without having to trawl through every example and adjust them manually?

Thanks,

Nathan.

2

For styling the quotes, try the Essay Block Quote (Preserved) paragraph preset. Restyle that to your specs.

I am not sure what you can do for styling the paragraphs after your quotes, that continue the logical paragraph and thus do not indent.

The full answer, I suspect, is to mark each document to compile As-Is and then hand-style each document so that it looks the way you want it to. My trick to doing something like that is to use Scriptwriting Mode after customizing the Scriptwriting paragraph presets the way I like - one that has nothing to do with traditional screenwriting format. You could have a preset that is indented and one that is not as well as one that handles your quotes.

You could also do all this via the standard paragraph presets (the ¶ button in the Formatting toolbar). I used to do it this way until I got tired of moving the mouse and clicking all the time. Working in Script Mode means a keyboard shortcut to reformat any existing paragraph, as well as rules as to paragraph flow (what paragraph follows what: a no-indent paragraph would force an indent-paragraph to follow it, for example).

The manual gives better explanations than I can, along with screen caps that make it even more understandable.

  • asotir
3

Tried that, the trouble being that every use of the return key results in a new paragraph, so Scriv adds all the extra spacing the preset applies within the quote as well as outside it - it doesn’t seem there’s a way to preset-format blocks of text with custom spacing around the blocks, rather than around each individual paragraph within the block. Unless I’m missing something.

Yep, been manually adjusting after the fact. Easy to miss something and a bit of a drag…

Hmm, not sure I follow your meaning. Will take another look at the manual later.

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile:

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That is true, there is no such thing as an arbitrary “block” in Scrivener. The best you could do is fiddle with paragraph spacing for the upper/inner/lower paragraphs in the block quote, if you need each of those three conditions to have different spacing—by having three different Presets. Honestly it seems like more work to me than just handling this post-compile in a word processor. I’m not even sure how you would do this type of formatting in Pages in a manner that is any less time-consuming that in Scrivener. It seems to be devoid of the concept of multi-paragraph blocks, too. I’m no expert at it though.

You can assigned keyboard shortcuts to presets using the standard Mac OS X tools for menu customisation, in the Keyboard “Shortcuts” system preference pane.

I’m not sure what you mean by this, when would a line after a block quote not be a new paragraph? But whatever the case, the same principle holds true as for block quotes: if you want to do something unique with the formatting that the compiler should touch: use Preserve Formatting. If you need to carrying on the blue block beyond the block quote by one paragraph, then do so.

If you just can’t get things to work in conjunction with format override, then visit the Formatting compile option pane and switch it off at the top—or go into the Options button along the top of that pane, and take a look at the types of things you can enable or disable, when it comes to what Preserve Formatting, and general override, does.

You can for example cause the compile to leave all indent settings intact, as shown in the editor, while still cleaning up the font formatting, alignment, line spacing and so on. Likewise, in inverse, you can have Preserve Formatting only protect some things rather than everything.

You shouldn’t ever need to use “As-Is” for everything. That’s meant to be used only for exceptional cases like a table of contents, title page, or sections that are just overall dramatically different from “body text”. If you just want to not have Scrivener change your text formatting, disable the feature that is doing that. :slight_smile:

Another thing that may help you is the concept of line breaks: Use Opt-Cmd-Return to insert one. These will insert breaks inside of a paragraph. However, because they are all inside of a single paragraph, individual lines cannot have their own paragraph formatting—such as spacing. Additionally because they are considered a continuation of the paragraph, they will not use any first-line indentation rules. They have a few niche uses though, such as multi-line bullet list items, maybe you can find a usage with what you are doing.

5

Fair enough. It would be a very useful feature though…

Sometimes a block quote completes the sense of the argument; sometimes it doesn’t. I’d paragraph accordingly.

Aha! This might just be what I need! I’ll try it when I get chance today - thanks for your reply :slight_smile:

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I often use line breaks, and in various apps - the use you describe is one of the reasons I use it. Shortcut keys seem to vary, with Shift-return and opt-return are most common.

Like you, I don’t always start a new paragraph after a block quote. I think (I’d have to go back and check) that the last time I did this, I annotated these paragraphs in Scrivener and then manually reformatted them after compiling to Word.

7

Ok thanks nom – you and AmberV were right, Option-Command-Return is exactly what I needed! By setting up the block quotes preset with custom pre- and post-paragraph spacing, and using linebreak rather than return between quoted lines/paragraphs, the quotes appear correctly when directly exported to PDF. :smiley:

Still got to sort out the post-quote indents, but hey. Thanks folks!

I always felt like post-compile work in a word processor was a bit of a fudge. Not least because Pages isn’t directly supported so you have go via .doc or whatever, which adds another step of potential problems. Direct to PDF is my goal, and with the absolute minimum of fuss. Getting there!

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On reflection, I set up a paragraph preset in Scrivener that was identical to the normal paragraph preset except it was not indented. Used this for continuation of paragraphs after block quotes.

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I hope you can find a good solution! The biggest road block toward doing this in academic work is of course the bibliography and citations. If you’re using an external reference database, the best solution is nearly always to generate the bib and cite styles using that tool, after compiling. But if you can get away without it, I believe you can use Scrivener to get your document pretty close to done, if not completely.

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Thanks - actually the bibliography and footnotes have been fine so far, I’ve been generating them manually. I’m looking into citation managers for upcoming work, so that will be another learning curve.