I decided to try a scriptwriting project in iOS Scrivener.
Now, in all my other projects, the styles have changed to scriptwriting specs for their definitions. “Body,” for instance, is in Courier, with a left indent. The specific scriptwriting styles, such as Action, or Character, don’t appear. It’s all the default styles for a regular, non-scriptwriting document. On the other hand, if I go back to my script project, those scriptwriting styles no longer appear there, either.
Screenwriting is turned on in the Project Editor for the script project. It’s turned off for the other projects. And naturally, in the other projects, there is no scriptwriting toggle, document by document.
I’ve rebooted the app, have restarted my iPad, to no avail.
Has anyone else experienced this? Do I just re-install iOS Scrivener? Not sure I’ve done this before. I do have all projects saved in Dropbox, and archives saved in iCloud, but I’m still a little nervous about a re-install.
Much obliged to the community for any suggestions.
I’m wondering if maybe there is some confusion about these observations that could be explained by other causes than having scriptwriting mode spread from one project to another (which should be thoroughly impossible):
Enabling scriptwriting toggles in a project does not replace or change the formatting styles list. That is the same as the desktop version, the scriptwriting system doesn’t use styles, it uses its own mechanism. So that you do not see scriptwriting elements in the Styles list (when clicking on the brush button), is perfectly fine.
Scriptwriting documents, those that have been toggled in the inspector and show a yellow page icon, have their elements switched in the header bar, not with the style system.[1] You will only see that while editing a section that is toggled to use scriptwriting.
It is possible to override your default formatting to Courier or whatever other font you prefer, and some of the styles will indeed inherit from that choice, as all they are programmed to do is change font sizes, weight, or other paragraph-only characteristics. If you were to select from a scriptwriting document and make one of those lines your global default, it would indeed copy those settings everywhere—but it wouldn’t actually be scriptwriting, just copying those base attributes.
Reinstalling would reset the default formatting, but it would be far easier to position the cursor in a paragraph you want as default; any existing text in a standard project will do. Then tap the brush button, and under Formatting Options, tap the “Set as Default Formatting” button.
Along with ⌥⌘Num keys to trigger an element by its order in that list, and typical Return flow from one common element to the next, and Tab on an empty line to trigger alternative common elements. ↩︎
Indeed, all I had to do was pick a document where the Body style was formatted as I wanted it and choose to make it the default for Body. Everything cascaded from there into all the projects.
So . . . I must have somehow at one time with the scriptwriting project chosen Courier as the default. I guess my next question, which I think I can answer, would be, What if I want the Body style to differ from project to project? And I think the answer might be that Scrivener is a composition tool, not a page design tool. When you compile a project, the style definitions will be changed into the definitions present in your output target, i.e., Word or whatever.
There is no style customisation in the iOS version all by itself (just like you can’t customise script settings). That needs to be done on the PC/Mac side of things. It will sync the settings and styles along with the rest of the content.
But one thing to be clear on is that Scrivener doesn’t use a normal or body style by default. The compiler will change all text formatting automatically based on your settings. If you’re needing a 12pt TNR double-spaced output, for example, you do not have to stare at that format all day while writing, and can freely switch to something else for proofing if you prefer, etc. That’s what we mean by it not being a page design tool. You’re working more with plain old text and maybe a few styles here and there to mark special cases that you want the compiler to respect (like block quotes).
In short: you don’t normally have to worry about setting up each project to look different. There is a way of doing that on the desktop (it doesn’t even make a difference on iOS though), but it’s more of niche tool than how you’d generally use the software.