get rid of all formatting and just use plain text ascii?

i was wondering if there was an option to just turn off all formatting and wysiwyg stuff and just generate straight ascii text only…

i know there’s a way to get rid of the formatting bar but there have been times where i’m copying and pasting stuff and i retain the source’s formatting when i would rather not.

especially since we have a nice compiling feature where i can deal with all formatting issues later, it would be really cool to have a mode where all i’m doing is generating content without regard for presentation.

is there a way to do this now?

if not, are there any plans for such an option in the future?

it’s not a huge deal but it would really be nice to have.

thanks.

jin

p.s. i believe ulysses takes that kind of paradigm but alas, i’m on windows and i really like scrivener. :slight_smile:

Since you can (as you noted) output to any formatting you like, the input doesn’t really matter. Your documents [color=red]could [size=130]look like[/size] [size=80][color=green]this[/size], and come out uniform via the standard compile options with no further effort. Bold and italic are the only things that will remain intact. But if it bothers you to have variations in fonts as you edit, there are a few tools that let you get around this.

First up is to use Paste and Match Style. You can reassign the keyboard shortcuts in Scrivener so that you use CTRL-V for PaMS instead of the standard “Paste” if you do a lot of pasting from other sources.

Also, you can click on one or more documents in the binder and choose Documents->Convert->Formatting to Default Text Style to normalize the fonts in those documents to the default font (changeable in Tools->Options). This feature lets you work without messing with fonts while you cut, paste, edit and write, and then fix everything before it drives you batty.

Please note that I’m just another user; I don’t speak for Lit & Lat… but I’m going to guess that rich-text editing in the main editors is here to stay, and that plain text editing is not on the table, as most people rely on bold and italic at a minimum, which is not usually available in plain text editors.

Have a look at this thread Default Preferences to Emulate Plain-Text.

[url]https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/default-preferences-to-emulate-plain-text/13913/1]

Perhaps this might provide something of what you’re looking for?

This being the case, you might want to look into using some level of MultiMarkdown markup in your source… then you can have bold and italic and all that with JPA (Just Plain Ascii). You could even use AsciiDoc, which is another (much richer) markup system. The advantage of JPA markup is a) it’s portable and b) it’s readable.

“But if it bothers you to have variations in fonts as you edit, there are a few tools that let you get around this.”

oooooo… thanks robert. those tips will help a lot. especially the paste matching!

much appreciated!

jin

ooooooo! thank you much! that helps tremendously!

i posted a follow up question in that thread but do you know if there is a difference between just using a fixed width font vs. the last bullet point which is labeled “mac only”?

also, can you or anyone suggest a fixed width font in XP?

thanks.

jin