What is the difference between Block Quote and Essay Block Quote (Preserved)? What does the latter do that the former doesn’t?
The latter is what you want to use if you intend to have the compiler reformat your manuscript. Preserved blocks of text will appear in your editor as surrounded in a blue box. These will protect anything within them from being altered by the compiler. In many cases, you’ll just want to protect the indents that keep it looking like a block quote, and this option gives you the choice to do that. Not using preserved blocks means you have to switch off indent overrides for everything, and that means not being able to change indent styles and so on. It gives you a little more flexibility if you need it.
If you don’t need it, if you are using the editor like a word processor, then it’s fine to stick with regular block quotes.
Ok, that’s what I thought. When I did a test output to RTF/DOC, however, the block of text was bigger and had different spacing than the body text.
I did set the compile to output in a different font, as I use a different size screen font than paper font. Do you think that’s what caused it?
Right, what happened is you’ve changed the base formatting for the manuscript, but anything inside of those blocks will not by default get those changes, so they’ll end up looking exactly like they do in the editor rather than fitting in. If you just want to utilise one aspect of preserved blocks, click the Options button in the top of the table, by the main override switch. The settings displayed below will only preserve indents and tab stops.
With a setup like this, your block quotes will have a uniform look and feel to them, while retaining their offset from the margin.