Margins and more

Screen Shot 2016-08-24 at 10.03.17 PM.pngHoping someone can help me figure out a couple of perplexing and extremely irritating problems that pop up for me from time to time.

  1. Just as I was beginning to write a new scene I discovered that I had “lost” my formatting for new paragraph indents. This has happened two or three times before and it’s driving me to drink since I can’t remember how I set the indents in the first place! But also because I firmly believe that setting a paragraph indent should not be a mystery to be solved only after intense study and trial and error experimentation.

Yes, I admit I’m a little dense when it comes to these matters, but please don’t refer me to the horrid manual. As far as I know I did nothing to cause this problem, and trying to find a fix online is frustrating to say the least. But why does this ridiculous problem happen at all? And, when it does, why is it so hard to track down the reason? (I am old enough to remember my trusty typewriters whose operation and adjustments did not require all that much common sense)

  1. At the same time that my paragraph indents went missing my editor began (once again, seemingly out of the blue) to display an avocado green field behind the field of the text. (I’m sorry that I don’t know the terminology to describe this any better, but I have attached a screen shot). Also, when resizing the Scrivener “field”, by dragging the little arrows on the lower right corner, my text margins now remain fixed. Previously the margins would change in proportion to how much I increase or decrease the window size.

Thank you for any suggestions.

1: Scrivener->Preferences->Editor (I think, not at my Mac right now) is where you set the default font and paragraph settings for new documents created in the binder. The window should have some sample text in it that reflects the font and paragraph settings that will take hold when you create a new document in the binder.

2: I have never seen this kind of thing happen without someone deliberately going to the Scrivener->Preferences->Appearance settings and changing colors there. How it could just ‘happen’ is beyond me. You don’t happen to have a prankster in your home (or someone who thinks that these settings don’t affect you when they change them for their own projects)?

Regarding #2, if you haven’t tried this, try choosing

View > Page View > Hide Page View

It should return your text to its previous resizing behaviour and thankfully hide that avocado green as well. The command is a toggle with a keyboard shortcut that you might have accidentally typed.

Hope this helps!

Thank you, Silverdragon and rDale. Your help is very much appreciated. I was able to finagle around long enough to get the margins back on track and had totally forgotten about the View > Page View controls.