I’ve tried everything I can think of. I want the appearance on screen to be left justified single spaced Time New Roman 12, no indent, 12 points after a paragraph as standard spacing.
I have managed to get everything but the 12 points after to work. Things set in options seem to stick in preferences. The paragraph spacing isn’t in Tools | Options. The only place I can find to set it is in Format | Text -> Spacing and that does not stick as a preference. At least not for me.
Fitch
This setting should be working. The spacing tool is on the Format Bar under the same drop-down as in the editor, where you can set line-height easily—the trick is to select “More” at the bottom, to get the full spacing tools available. After setting that, you should see the attribution line in the sample text spaced out below the first paragraph, and then creating new documents will adopt those settings once they are saved. I just ran a quick test and got things set up the way you’re describing.
Thank you. If that works like it ‘should’ it will save me a lot of frustration. The spacing thing had turned into a water drip style torture.
I found it. It took me a while but ‘more’ is at the bottom of the drop down just to the right of the font size. Who’d a thunk it? I set it and new documents are indeed formatting as desired. Thanks for the help. I hope that is saved in the presets. I haven’t tested that yet.
The pop up explained what I was looking at. Now that I understand it, it tells me what I need to know. If the editor bar in Tools | Options | Editor had the exact same appearance, I might have found and been able to set this with out the frustration.
Please consider doing something to put all the appearance control presets in one place, and please make the editor bar in options identical to the real editor bar.
Edited to add: I looked at the tutorial for Page View and one for something called ‘Lion’. They clearly apply to the MAC version only. Hopefully the implementation of that in the Windows version isn’t too far away. I was almost drooling on my keyboard by the time the Page View tutorial was done.
Fitch
Just popping in to say that I’ve had to be told where to chase down that “More…” dialog too. Both the editor itself and the options dialog could be more helpfully designed in this regard, I think.
It would be nice, in an ideal world, if the buttons here could be identical to what is familar from the editor. The format bar in the Compile settings and here in Options is necessarily simplified down to the core features one would need here (it would make no sense to have the Table button in this context, for example), and doesn’t include any user customisations from the main application Format Bar, as one might have removed tools that they would need in this context.
Something that will help is a button that uses your current editor formatting to set up the default. When that is added you will be able to just use some existing text, rather than replicating the look with a list of settings you need to implement.
Now on the matter of the “More…” tucked away at the bottom of the line-height multiplier drop-down for setting such diverse things as paragraph spacing is something that bothers me. We’ll be looking at all of that kind of stuff in time.
The “Lion” bit was probably in reference to the Mac’s dedicated full screen mode, available to any application that supports it. It’s basically a “super maximise”, a mode that in Windows, would also hide the task bar and application menus so that the focus is on the content. We may take the time to replicate this feature if we can, but since it’s just an OS thing that Scrivener is compatibile with, it’s not a huge priority. We have other things… like Page View that we need to create, first. 
Thanks.
Page view was the part that had me drooling.
The ‘Copy This Look’ button to simplify setup of on screen appearance sounds good but I’d settle for everything in one place so I could find it. As long as the settings can be saved as a set they don’t need frequent modification.
With those additions, the only feature I’m really desperate for, so far, is something that works like MS-WORDS document compare.
Fitch