I love the idea of having a solid place to do all the writing and outlining, but I find that whenever I attempt to use Scrivener, I spend most of my time formatting the document because I don’t understand why scrivener does certain things. Instead of writing my project, I’m reading “how to guides” online on how to fix formatting options in Scrivener. For example, I press enter and Scrivener suddenly indents the next paragraph without me telling it to do so. Sometimes it increases the spacing, sometimes changes the type of headline etc. etc. I google one thing and fix the problem, but then another problem arises.
So, before I abandon Scrivener for Apple notes, is there a way to turn off all kind of formatting ideas implemented by Scrivener and leave that to me, so that I can get back to writing? This goes for both macOS and iOS!
Don’t use any of the templates. Start with the blank one. Don’t try to format anything as if you were using a WYSIWYG word processor. Just write plain text. You’ll be fine. (I’ve used Scrivener since about 2006, or thereabouts, and I’ve only ever used the blank template. It was fine for an 85,000 word thesis.) You can format after you’ve finished writing.
If you don’t like the formatting in the Blank template, format one paragraph the way you want, select it, and use the Scrivener -> Preferences -> Editing -> Formatting pane to make that the Scrivener-wide default.
Katherine
PS Edit: If you haven’t already, you might have a look at the Interactive Tutorial, available from the Help menu.
I got this awesome outlining template I got from an author but I find this problem still exist if I start from scratch with a blank page. Having done some further googling, it looks like if I go into preferences > Editing > Formatting and drag all the rulers to the absolute left, that takes care of the weird automatic indents.
If I then save that, and select ALL folders and documents in the binder and then go to Documents > Convert > Text to Default Formatting… it applies these rules across the board.