'No Style' Not Working Properly in One Project Since Update to Scrivener 3.1.6 Today

[gvdv]

I am running Win 11, updated to the newly released Scrivener 3.1.6 earlier today (Sept. 3rd.), and since the update I have been experiencing several problems with the ‘No Style’ command; these problems did not exist previously (in my 4 years using Scrivener).

I make extensive use of ‘No Style’, using it 40 or 50 times a day to remove Strikethrough from several paragraphs at a time in what I will call my Reviews Project,

I know I could use the ‘Strikethrough’ button itself, but I like to use ‘No Style’ to remove as much formatting as possible from the text, and I like this way of working.

Here are the changes that have occurred since I updated Scrivener in the last hour:

‘No Style’ only works in removing Strikethrough from text if I select a word within a paragraph or sentence, apply ‘No Style’, and then select the rest of the paragraph and apply the style a second, or even a third time - if I select several paragraphs at a time, or the whole of one paragraph (anything including the first word of a sentence or paragraph), the ‘No Style’ command does not remove Strikethrough from the text.

So, the negative changes here are that I have to:
(a) Use the ‘No Style’ command several times, incrementally, rather than being able to select a whole sentence, paragraph, or series of paragraphs, in order to have ‘No Style’ successfully remove the Strikethrough in one action

(b) Any time the first word of a sentence, or paragraph is included in the selection, ‘No Style’ will not work, unless I first select other text in the sentence / paragraph, apply ‘No Style’, and then go back and apply ‘No Style’ to the first word

(c) This is the way I have to use ‘No Style’ now in all documents in my Reviews Project that have Strikethrough text

(c) ‘No Style’ will work in removing Strikethrough in some other projects - but these are projects in which I have not previously used Strikethrough

In other words, if I go into these projects, apply Strikethrough to some text (e.g., part of a sentence, whole sentence, paragraph or several paragraphs), then select all of the text to which the Strikethrough is applied and apply ‘No Style’, the ‘No Style’ command works successfully, as it used to

Unfortunately, the Reviews Project (which is now about 3 years-old, and 340MB in size) is something I use several times a day, and which has extensive Strikethrough applied to text in hundreds of documents.

Is there anything anyone can suggest to help get the ‘No Style’ command back to its previous (perfect) operation with my Reviews Project, I would be very grateful.

Thanks.

[Vincent_Vincent]

Sometimes I use Ctrl-X ⮚ Ctrl-Shft-V (I would use that when I want to remove something, highlight, italics, whatever, but don’t want to bother with an accurate text selection. So, I select a bit before up to a bit after, then run this shortcut sequence.)
Depending on the situation, perhaps that could get you through without a roll-back. (?)

This will remove all formatting (italics, bold too), but I think that from your description that’s what you use to get anyways, right?

Alternatively, if the above doesn’t work (although I can’t think of why it wouldn’t), you could create a style that saves all formatting, make it so that it doesn’t include strikethrough, and then when you want to clear a paragraph, ping pong to it before no style.
Give it an easy shortcut, for convenience.
Once your project will be back on track, you can simply forget it ever happened.

. . . . . . . . . .

Another possible fix to try, since you say fresh strikethrough is fine :

⮚⮚ Strikethrough shortcut twice. (Or just once, if what you want is to remove them all.)

…With a bit of luck, that will have fixed your strikethrough text into behaving.
Test on a document.
(Of course, if you use styles – different styles – all over your paragraphs, that won’t work.)

. . . . . . . .
Ultimately, you could roll-back to the previous version of Scrivener, but that wouldn’t be such a good thing, since you’ll imprint the same problem to your other projects. (Assuming that that’s what the issue really is.)

[kewms]

I think you may be misunderstanding the “No Style” option. It is not intended to be a blanket “remove formatting” command.

[Vincent_Vincent]

Well, it does remove character attributes.
I think I can confirm that it doesn’t exactly do as before. (Although it ain’t a problem for me. And doesn’t seem to be a problem for the OP in his/her other projects.)

It’s hard to say, but with the text selected all character attributes go away, no problem.
It is better than it was before, actually. (If, there is a difference. It feels like there is one, but that’s not quite how I use to do things, so I can’t be sure.)

[kewms]

@Vincent_Vincent

It’s hard to say, but with the text selected all character attributes go away, no problem.

Not how it behaves on the Mac, unless the character attributes are part of a Style that is being removed.

[Vincent_Vincent]

. . . . . . . .

No result
⮟⮟

As @gvdv said, it doesn’t work with the beginning of the paragraph implicated.

Whether it was like this before the update or not, I can’t tell.

[gvdv]

@kewms

I think you may be misunderstanding the “No Style” option. It is not intended to be a blanket “remove formatting” command.

Thanks.

I do know that the ‘No Style’ is not intended to be a blanket ‘remove formatting’ command, but it has worked to the extent that I need it to in that respect for the last few years, so I wanted to keep on using it like that.

More to the point, it is not working in the way it used to work - i.e., removing a Strikethrough in the ways I described above.

[gvdv]

Thanks, Vincent_Vincent.

It was working fine for me with the beginning of paragraphs before the update – the first thing I did after updating (and I am using Windows 11) was to try to remove the Strikethrough from several paragraphs of text in one of my reviews in my Reviews Project, and that was when I noticed the New style’ was not working for me as it has worked on so many thousands of occasions previously.

[gvdv]

Hi Vincent_Vincent,
thanks for your suggestions.

I think at this point, it is probably easier for me to simply use the Strikethrough button, which is working as it should.

In some ways I am glad that you are able to reproduce this problem – that suggests to me there is a systemic bug going on here, although it appears to be inconsistent.

Part of that inconsistency seems to be that I am encountering it with that one project of mine, but not in others, so I am very curious, though, to know why the ‘No Style’ works in other, older projects, which no longer contain any Strikethrough text, but does not work in my Reviews Project.

[Vincent_Vincent]

To take a guess (and that’s pretty much all it is, a guess), I would say that perhaps the way a style is delimited in relation to the paragraph is different.
So, perhaps in this new version of the app, it thinks “…this paragraph is already no style”.
As opposed to selecting only a section of it, beginning left out, in which case it operates on the attributes only.

@gvdv

I think at this point, it is probably easier for me to simply use the Strikethrough button, which is working as it should.

Yep. If it works it works.

@gvdv

that suggests to me there is a systemic bug going on here

From what @kewms said, chances are that the part that “works” is the actual bug. If it is not intended to work the way you’ve used it so far, then that’s the buggy part (sometimes bugs turn out to be useful), and what “doesn’t work” is actually how it should be. (?)

Speculations, speculations…

@gvdv

works in other, older projects, which no longer contain any Strikethrough text, but does not work in my Reviews Project.

I’d have a look see if by any chance the paragraph prior to the one you tested it on was of a style. Any style other than no style.

Or perhaps I wouldn’t. If that’s how things are now, there is only one long term fix : adapt. (Nothing there that one can’t do.)

[AmberV]

Yes, to confirm (I’ve switched the tag to feedback): the way this tool works now is the way it was intended to work.^[1] On both the Mac and Windows it started out as something capable of almost standing in as the convert documents to default formatting menu command, but on a localised level.

To be honest I never liked this change either, when it came to the Mac. I used the No Style command you did, and it was very convenient for that. But I guess this was never actually meant to be a tool that easily cleans up formatting in general, but rather meant to be more a tool that works chiefly on styles… which kind of makes sense—even though it does leave a gap in the software where there was once a nice tool in between Paste and Match Style and convert Text to Default Formatting.

Here are the original macOS change notes (26th June 2019):

Made improvements to the way styles are removed. Character styles can now be removed more easily when a paragraph style is present, and direct character formatting is no longer removed when resetting to “No Style”.

Not the wording, “improvements”, in that removing character formatting without an explicit selection was considered a negative thing. Again, I never saw it that way, and lost a very useful tool when this change was made… but I moved on.

The way I coped with the loss of this behaviour is to throw a shortcut on Edit ▸ Select ▸ Select Similar Formatting. Since it needs an explicit selection, that gives you one without much hassle, and you can go back to using No Style since explicit selections still drop non-styled formatting.

---

1. Well, there are still some remaining issues with it that need resolution, but it’s a lot closer to the design goal now. ↩︎

[gvdv]

Understood.

Thanks, Amber.

Working in my Reviews Project today reminded me of why I started using the ‘No Style’ feature as I did - and, ironically, now the ‘No Style’ no longer works as it used to, the problem I was having has re-surfaced for me, and I will create a separate thread about that, to see if anything can be done.

[gvdv]

Thanks for this, Vincent.

The inconsistency with the way the ‘No Style’ feature works is strange, and has brought something else up for me, which I will ask about in a separate thread.

[woee]

Why remove an easy feature to “convert” anything to your default setting? I use the ‘No style’ feature like that. Maybe not intended, but very useful.

[kewms]

You can just download and install the older version from here:
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/downloads/win-legacy/Scrivener-3151-installer.exe

Your data is stored separately from the Scrivener application and won’t be affected. (That said, making an extra backup is never a bad idea.)

[xiamenese]

This thread intrigued me, being a Mac-user who has never had occasion to think about this, so I did some experimentation.

I took a paragraph in one of my test projects which was in “Block Quote” style, and made spans variously italic, bold, bold italic or strikethrough. I then proceeded to convert the paragraph to “No Style” by two methods, using the formatting bar dropdown[1], with the following results:

• I clicked on “Block Quote”, which removed the style (which is set to “Paragraph style” only, with no font attributions); the paragraph was now shown as “No Style” with the default margins, but the embellishments (italic, bold, etc.) were retained.
• I clicked on “No Style”, which removed the “Block Quote” style; the paragraph was now shown as “No Style” with the default margins, however the embellishments were all removed.

That was interesting and to me seems to give us, Mac-users at least, a choice of being able to retain the embellishments or not as needed. Mind you, if you wanted to remove strikethrough, while preserving italics and bold, you’d need to do that some other way.

Mark

[1] I have shortcuts set up for both “No Style” and “Block Quote”, but not knowing what the case is on Windows I used the dropdown. I’m sure the shortcuts would produce the same results.