THANK YOU! I have been struggling with this ever since Scrivener 3 for Windows came out! I use styles a lot because they propagate to Word and that makes it easier for me to change the styles in the .docx, but the loss of italics was killing me. Redefining the style with italics in the selection as well as regular meant that when I compiled it worked.
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You’re probably projecting.
Just followed your steps successfully. Many thanks! This is quick and easy, so I recommend others try it before they pursue more time-consuming options.
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Thanks for the feedback, and glad it helped.
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I ran into the issue that I lost all my italics when I compiled to a word doc.
I tried to go through some of the fixes suggested above (the ones I could follow, some of them seemed give a run-around) and sort of got it to work when I did a test of switching to “no style” every time I want to use italics.
However, I’m already 50,0000 words in, and that’s really tedious and time consuming and I’d have to remember to do it as I worked, so it’s not ideal. I used different styles for some other formatting sections so I don’t want to just turn off styles for the entire document because that would create a LOT of work to redo.
So it’s been two years since anyone posted here. Is it actually fixed yet? Or out of all the suggestions above, can someone please point me to the one that will work best?
I started this manuscript in an older version of Scrivener and then treated myself to the new version, so I’m running 3.1.6.0.
Thanks all!
And it does appear to be an issue that’s confined to the older file - I made a brand new file and tested the different styles and formats with italics and it all compiled perfectly. So it’s good to know that if I start a fresh project, this won’t be an issue.
However, I’ve got several WIP progress from the older version and it would be wonderful if I could preserve the formatting on those when I compile.
I think that the problem is that most word processors give the impression that Italics and bold are “styles” because they are distinctive on screen; but they are not true “styles”, they are technically embellishments.
So when people come to Scrivener and see that text is in No Style, they think, “Hang on a minute, in Word all the text is in ‘Body’ style!” So they create a ‘Body’ style of, let’s say, 12pt Times New Roman Regular, and type away happily in that, hitting Cmd/Ctrl-I when they want italics and Cmd/Ctrl-B if they want bold.
Then, when they come to compile, lo and behold, shock-horror, “Where have all my italics and bold gone?” Answer: you set your ‘Body’ style to Times New Roman 12pt Regular; Times New Roman Italics and Times New Roman Bold are different members of the font family, and so they are overridden because you said you wanted your ‘Body’ style in Times New Roman Regular.
No Style is compiled to ‘Body’ or ‘Normal’ style—depending on the target format— using whatever font family is designated in the compiler. But because No Style has no font details baked in, it does not say “All this must be in x-font y-point Regular”, so any italics or bold embellishments created with Cmd/Ctrl-I or Cmd/Ctrl-B will not be overridden in compile, and will be rendered using whatever font family is assigned by compile.
Funnily enough, it is Scrivener that does styles right, not traditional word processors. Fundamentally, in general, the fewer attributes—font, size, italics or bold—you give any style you create, i.e. only those that are absolutely necessary, the better the outcome will be.
If you really want italics and bold as styles rather than embellishments, create emphasis and strong character styles and use those; they will not be overridden by compile.
Mark
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And I’m tracking all that…but currently I’m in a “damage done” situation for like 50,000 words and trying to figure out if there’s a quick way to fix it so I can compile and send it off without a few hours more worth of work.
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Apologies… I wrote that really as a general contribution intended to be of help to anyone who comes across this and wonders what’s going on, even while realising that you had already worked much of it out. 
Have you tried selecting all the text in a document and using Documents > Convert > Text to Default Formatting…? In my experience, that sets the text to No Style but leaves italic and bold intact. Sadly, as it seems you’re on Windows, you have to do it document by document. If you have a Mac-using friend you trust, if it works the way you want, they can do the whole lot at one go.
HTH
Mark
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I feel it requires periodic reiteration in threads like this, as bug reports and descriptions can end up becoming “that’s how Scrivener is meant to work”. I went into the expected behaviours in detail, but briefly:
Caveat on the last line there is that there was a regression in the Windows version, a bug fix that went back to not working the way it should. So now in Paragraph+Character styles you do lose italics when you should not, but only if the compiler also tries to modify the appearance of that style.
As for fixing this quickly, please refer to the instructions provided earlier in the thread, which might have been missed. You might need to do the “font swap” set of instructions to clear the remnants of the old bug out of style definition.
The expected behaviour is described in detail in this post, which includes a sample project. The project will demonstrate the regression I referred to, in the C-03 test. In this case, unlike B-02 (where italics are preserved), the paragraph style is changed by the compiler to use a different font and indent, and that process damages the italics.
One small set of clarifications here:
- This command is a document-based command rather than text selection. Although it can be used from the editor as well the selection isn’t used, it always resets the entire section. But the best way is to select all of the items in the draft folder (or whatever amount one wishes to change). There is no Windows limitation here.
- The option it provides (off by default) to nuke styles really nukes styles. You generally don’t want that except in unusual cases post-import of some document that has style names matching your drafting styles but you don’t want it linked to your draft formatting. Granted if the only style you’ve ever used is “Body”, then I suppose you could do it that way—but the method I gave in the prior linked post is safer and more direct to the point: just delete the “body” style from the project. You almost never need this kind of redundant statement in Scrivener. Everything that isn’t another style is already “body text”.
But again, to really hammer it in:
- You do not have to use “Emphasis” or a style for bold as well. You certainly may, but that is not a necessity.
- You are meant to be able to use regular old italics/bold anywhere you want, and always have it survive compile. In fact, it even is meant to be smart enough to invert italics, for cases where the style formatting is transformed to bulk italics. I.e. if you create a “Monologue” section type and have some italic phrases within it, if the compiler takes that text and reformats it to bulk italic, the phrases you marked as italic should become upright, as it the typical convention.
- You can absolutely use “Body” if you want, but you can maybe see why we say in the tutorial and other training materials to avoid doing so. You have to learn more, and spend more time fiddling with stuff. But you can, tests C-03 in the sample project demonstrate how to fix the sort of problems that can arise from using body text styles, with the common symptoms as seen in the B-03 test (the rest of the book is in Consolas, but the “body” styled paragraph resolutely sticks to one’s writing font, or Sitka in that case).
But anyway, that’s how things are meant to work. With the bug regression in Windows, C-03 doesn’t work, which means you don’t want to use body styles or you’ll end up with B-03 results in order to keep italics, and that’s not much of an improvement.
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I tried that, but it just made ALL my text in the style italics
Oops, I was referring to the shortcut KR posted about saving all the text options under Body Text…
I’m trying to get Amber’s fix to work but no luck yet.
Thanks for replying, everyone! I appreciate the help.
After some more fiddling - Amber’s solution WORKED! Thank you.
The only weird thing is that in this story, I have brand name that uses an italicized ! at the end (like Sample*!* ) and not all those ! carried over when I flipped the styles back and forth, and those are only in a couple sections anyway so if that’s the worst causality I can go forward from here.
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Hi Rachel, I’ve just tested and it works fine. I choose a section of the manuscript, change some parts of it (but not all) to the different styles I might want to use, eg ital, then go to Format>Style>New style from selection. Give it a name, and then set all your text in that style. It’s important to leave part (most) of the text in the regular body format or you will get everything in itals.
Glad to hear you got it fixed! 
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Just hopping back on here with another question for Amber - do I need to do a Font Swap every time I compile this project? Because I just compiled again and lost formatting, but the Font Swap fixed it again, which is great, but is there a way to permanently lock in the settings? Thanks!
I don’t see that happening in the test project provided above. If I open and compile that it works fine, and then for good measure I edited each binder item to better simulate real-world conditions and it compiled out the same.
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