Help! All text in documents has disappeared

I’ve used Scrivener for a long time and I’ve never had this happen. I opened a document that was working just fine yesterday. The text showed up very narrow, about maybe 2 inches wide. I messed around with indents and it got narrower. I did something else and it started slowly getting narrower and narrower, til it was one character wide. Then it all just disappeared. All documents in the project are the same. Nothing shows up. However, I can select-all, copy, and paste into another word processing program and it shows up. Can anyone help me with this?

I just selected “View” “Text Editing” “Show Page View” and all my text reappeared. But I still want to know what the heck happened. Is it a glitch in Scrivener or something I did?

If the text reappeared in Page View, it was never really “gone,” just hidden by your display settings.

The first thing I’d check is the Ruler, which you can reveal with the View → Text Editing → Show Ruler command. In particular, check the right and left indents, which appear as downward pointing arrows on the Ruler.

You might also check the Editor’s appearance settings, which you’ll find in the Scrivener → Settings → Appearance → Main Editor → Options pane. It’s possible that you accidentally made the Editor window too narrow to show any text. (These settings don’t affect Page View, so you’ll need to turn Page View off to test them.)

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Thank you. I did check those things. It was changing it to “show page view” that made it return. At this point I am just curious because I didn’t change the page view setting prior to the problem arising, hadn’t even gotten into Scrivener since the previous day. Appreciate your taking the time to answer though.

As this seems like it might not have to do with indents directly, given how you describe it getting progressively worse, and showing across multiple documents (where indents would likely not all be the same), it might be worth running a quick reset on your project’s interface settings.

I would also check to see whether any other projects (such as the Interactive Tutorial, from the Help menu), exhibit similar issues. If not, that would reinforce it is an issue with the project’s settings. If it is global, a wider scale settings reset may be in order.

In both cases, I would suggest setting aside the ui.plist and com.literatureandlatte.scrivener3.plist files, rather than trashing them. If the reset does clear the problem you could send these in to tech support, and we could take a look at them and see if there is a bug causing it, as opposed to just some one-off gremlin (as can sometimes happen on a Mac).

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Thank you. I will see if I can do these things.