for some reason, when i apply a style to a selected piece of text, it affects the rest of the paragraph. is there a shortcut that makes the paragraphs separate? this wasn’t an issue with the old version of scrivener.
The old version of Scrivener didn’t use styles, simply formatting presets.
The style that you are trying to apply – is it defined as a paragraph style or a character style?
I’m not sure, is there any options to change it to just character?
Chapter 15 of the manual (which you can reach by pressing F1 from within the Scrivener beta) talks all about styles – specifically, section 15.6. 15.6.2 talks about the differences and 15.6.3 talks about the various ways to manipulate styles, including redefining them.
You can try this: first look above the editor and verify the format bar is showing (you’ll see the style picker, font picker, font styles, etc visible; if it isn’t, you can select View->Text Editing->Format Bar to show it.)
With the style picker showing, you can select the down arrow in the style picker and, at the very bottom, choose Show Style Panel.) From that, you can see which styles are defined as character styles, and which are paragraph styles.
After re-reading what I wrote above, I realized the Style menu (Format->Style) also separates the styles into Paragraph Styles and Character Styles, as does right clicking on some selected text and going to the Style sub-menu.
If you’ve applied a paragraph style and intended it to be a character style, you can select some of the styled text and create a new style from the selection and define it as a character style (or vice versa) I believe.