During the Mac 3.0 beta, a number of us users asked for things to be this way and for a while, it was. However, there are some common compilation scenarios that were actually made more difficult by doing it this way and KB backed that change back out.
Since Scrivener is not a strict WYSIWYG platform – the Compilation step completely disconnects that concept – it doesn’t match up to a lot of the “intuitive” behaviors and patterns we’ve all picked up through the years from other software. And that’s a feature, not a bug!
You set it up in the Preferences (Tools → Options in Windows version?), the say you want the text to look in the Editor while you are writing. This way all new documents will use that format.
I use Menlo as my standard font while writing because I find it relaxing, making me calm while writing. But I never use Menlo for output when I compile the text.
Perhaps those should be the same, so there’s less confusion? Trust me, people will still be confused, but perhaps a little less.
I don’t use a Mac. I use Windows and Linux. They’re supposed to eventually be the same, right?
That depends. The Style Guides for various manuscripts would certainly suggest so. This kind of font. Those things underlined. These things capitalized. Right? And I can follow a classic style guide with a normal typewriter. But the “style” of referencing book names in a document requires underlining them.
And, if I talk to people about “this style of text,” certainly italics or underlines might be referred to as a style, even if they only occur in random locations through the text (like underlining references, etc.).
In Word those aren’t “styles.” In Scrivener they aren’t “styles.” They’re just random applications of formatting. But…many people don’t think about it that way.
But I think both of you missed my point. “No Style” is to me essentially a default style, because I can define its formatting, and I can use various commands (like “No Style”) to apply “No Style” to text (it actually doesn’t; it removes other styles. But to the user, the underlying complexities don’t matter. Clicking “No Style” to text of another style changes that text to “No Style”). So it behaves like a style, in large part. It’s the style of text that’s present when all other styles have been removed, or haven’t been applied.
And, honestly, this is what bothers me about the whole “No Style” concept to begin with. It acts like a duck, it quacks like a duck. But it leaves no footprints. Other styles leave footprints. Does that make “No Style” not a duck? Nonsense. It’s a disabled duck.
I hope you at least understand what I’m saying. You may not agree.
With respect, I wasn’t suggesting anybody should have to learn desktop publishing to use Scrivener, only that the current setup is not intuitive or consistent.
Obviously, you’re the expert and if having fully implemented styles would cause conflicts with the compile comman (which is, obviously, one of the program’s most useful features), that’s a good reason not to change the way it works.
However, I personally would prefer the default text “style” (or whatever you prefer call it) to be defined in the same way as every other style (e.g via “Format | Style”) and to have the option of applying it with a simple keyboard shortcut, just like every other style. As I said in my original post, might not be possible for version 3.0, but I’ll repost this as a suggestion for a future version. Thanks.
Thanks; good point, but I would then have to remember to apply it to every paragraph, instead of it acting like a proper default. Not the end of the world, obviously, but the whole point of a default setting is to save you work; your suggestion seems like making work to overcome what still strikes me as a slightly unintuitive design decision by the developers.
You define the default in Options (Preferences in Windows) and then won’t have to think about it as all new documents will have this No style formatting.
In the project’s default formatting – so that it is formatted the same as whatever your style will be if no style is in fact applied
As a new paragraph style (so you get the keyboard shortcut). Make sure that this new style is set as the “next” so when you set a paragraph in this style, it will automatically apply to the new paragraphs being created.
You then make sure that in your compile options, you have your defaults and a style set up so you match both 1) and 2) and output the correct style when you compile the document.
Sure, you may have some spots in your Scriv doc that don’t have the right style applied – but that’s what Compile is for is to ensure your consistency, right?
Thanks again to all the people who are helpfully telling me how this works; I appreciate the comments, but I actually know how it’s supposed to work. The point is that it doesn’t if for any reason (such as importing, copying and pasting when you’ve forgotten to choose “Paste and match style”, etc.) you get a paragraph that’s incorrectly formatted, clicking on the “No Style” option does not reformat properly every time, and you cannot apply a keyboard shortcut to “No Style”.
Well, when I run 29012 under Crossover on my Mac, “No Style” has the Keyboard shortcut Shift-Alt-0. You need to use the Format > Styles menu to see the established shortcuts. Do you not find that under Windows.
It also seems strange to me that you couldn’t add your own shortcut to it under Windows, though I don’t know how you do it in Windows and I must confess I haven’t had to try to do it on the Mac.
Thanks – you are quite right and I don’t know how I missed it, but that’s the shortcut in Windows too. (Luckily for my ego there’s no facepalm emoji here!)
Incorectly formatted paragraphs can be set to default formatting by Convert → to default text format (I don’t remeber the exact phrasing of the command).
The Editor part of Scrivener is designed for writing, not for importing stuff from elsewhere, so it’s logical that it’s designed to make writing as easy as possible, and as I wrote earlier, the text you start writing in all new documents gets the default formatting and no style.
So what’s the problem, really?
