There are a few tell-tales like that. Having all of your special characters escaped is the most obvious one, but how your line spacing was spread out is another big tell. This switch is designed for people that don’t write in Markdown—they’ll be using Scrivener like Word or similar, with one paragraph break separating each, nothing but formatting to keep them from looking like one long blob of text. So the converter is designed to take that and add newlines between them, and a lot of other things like bold, italics, tables, lists and so forth, you’d see them converted too.
With that flag off (and really being off), the assumption is that you prefer to write using Markdown, and it leaves your text alone. It’ll add stuff that makes sense, like images you’ve dropped into the editor, but otherwise it leaves your line spacing alone and doesn’t escape asterisks, etc.
Until the checkbox can correctly switch this behaviour off, compiling as Markdown is difficult. Might be easier to use plain-text, if you’re in a bind—sorry about that.
It is a pretty neat trick! You wouldn’t ordinarily think of applying formatting styles to text in Markdown settings, but when you consider what all styles can do for Markdown, it’s pretty useful.
Go into the Section Layouts area, and note at the bottom a checkbox to enable formatting override. With that enabled, you can click into the sample text and apply a style to it. It’s the icon on the far left of the format bar.
What that style does, in Markdown terms, is defined in the Styles compile pane. An example: I have a Section Layout called “Definition Item”. It prints the title of the card on one line, and then sets the style of all text in the card to “Definition”. In the Styles pane, I have this “Definition” style set to prefix each paragraph with “:”. Thus the result when compiled is:
Binder Item Title
: Contents of the item. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
:
: Next paragraph, and so on...
That will create a Markdown definition list, useful for glossaries and such. I.e. you can create a glossary as a folder of outline items, one per glossary entry, each one using this Layout as a template to print themselves.
As to what I mean by “text that isn’t already styled”, if you style text in the editor itself, that has the highest level of precedence in the compile system. Say you have a paragraph that is styled as a block quote within this “Definition Item” layout. Scrivener won’t change the style of that paragraph from block quote to definition, it will respect your choice in the matter. It will go on adding “:” in front of the lines around that block quote, though.
Lastly, that asterisks starting off a line are not escaped might be something we need to look at. Again if we consider this mode of operation as being used by those that don’t use Markdown, even if it is unlikely that an asterisk would prefix a line like that, it’s safer to assume the user meant to type it in and print it that way, not as a bullet item—and that means escaping it. But I’ll double-check on that.
