Possible formatting bug

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

First post, I hope I’m doing this right. Scrivener 3.4 on OS X Sonoma 14.5.

I created a new document.
Typed a title and centered it.
Hit return and changed formatting to left align on the new paragraph.
Hit return again for a double space before my next paragraph.
There are now three paragraphs in my document, the first is centered, the next two are left aligned.
Now I realized I wanted to put an indent, so I hit select all, and then command-option-I to bring up the Paragraph Indents box.
I entered .2 for the indent.
When I hit return, the .2 indent is applied to all three paragraphs.
BUT, the alignment for the second and third paragraphs is changed to Center. This seems obviously wrong.

That’s the bug. It happens every time. It’s not preventing me from getting work done, but still this is obviously not the right behavior for this function.

Pete

2

Why did you select all, though? If you want the title centered on the page, it should not include an indent.

3

Select all is faster.

In production there will be a style in InDesign (probably) for titles, so it will be taken care of then. In manuscript it’s close enough.

4

The “Scrivener-like” solution, FWIW, would be to use the Binder title in the output document and not have the title in the body text at all.

1 Like
5

I’d vote for that.

Meanwhile, I’m new here. Is there any chance someone from the Scrivener team will respond?

6

Hi Pete_McCabe. If you see a response from someone with a moderator’s shield like kews and I have, we’re members of the L&L tech-support team.

7

Thanks for clarifying. So the “why select all” was a tech support response? If so, it did not solve the problem.

Anyway, Do you agree that this is not the correct behavior for the app? If so, is this important enough to be fixed? Thanks in advance.

8

I’ve done a bit more testing, and found that using the “Increase Indents” menu item leaves the centering alone, while using the “Tabs and Indents” dialogue does not. I’m going to call that a bug.

I’m not the developer, though, so I can’t speculate on what the time frame might be to address it.

In the meantime, as I said, the Scrivener-like approach is to put headings in the Binder and format them via the Compile command.

Also, the recommended approach to line spacing, indents, and so on would be to define them as default formatting for the project (or for Scrivener as a whole) and only use the Format commands for exceptions.

2 Likes