Hi, I’ve been using the formatting presets such as body, block quote, and a few I created. When I make changes to a preset, I expect that change to be implemented project-wide, much as Styles would be in Word. Instead, I have to go back and re-highlight and re-format everything. Is this expected behavior? How do I get it go re-format text that has been set to a particular preset. And what is the correct and/or best use of formatting presets?
Thanks. Confused in Napa,
– Amber
Hi,
Yes, this is expected behaviour - this is why they are called “formatting presets” and not “styles”. Scrivener does not have a true styles system. Formatting presets are just that - a set of formatting options that are saved and that can be applied to any given text. The text itself knows nothing of the preset. There is therefore no way to have all text throughout the project updated by changing a style preset (a concept more problematic in Scrivener anyway, seeing as it is made up of lots of different text documents rather than a single document as in a word processor - thus any updating would have to be done “behind the user’s back”). In general, the idea is that you don’t worry about formatting too much while editing in Scrivener and then apply any special formatting to the text during the Compile process, although of course you are equally welcome to format-as-you-go. (A true styles system may come in the future, but because of the complexity of such a system with a program like Scrivener, and because the OS X text system that Scrivener uses has no concept of styles, this certainly won’t happen before at least version 3.0, I’m afraid.)
All the best,
Keith