I’ve been using Scrivener for many years now and am very happy with it - except for one big issue that keeps costing me a lot of time:
I DO NOT WANT DIFFERENT FONTS OR LINEBREAKS OR SPACING OR INDENTATIONS IN ANY OF MY TEXTS. EVER!
But no matter what I do or how I do it, Scrivener keeps presenting me with new fonts and different layouts. Sometimes, this happens when I just add an existing text to an existing document. And it always seems to happen when I copy and paste something, even within the same piece of work: I copy a paragraph with intentation, paste it to a page that has intentations, too - BAM, the pasted text has NO indentations.
Is there a solution to this? Where can I go to permanently set my default layout, so it actually sticks to all present and future texts in Scrivener (unless I explicitly go to the “Format” menu option and change some existing text in my documents)?
Have you tried using Edit/Paste and Match Style instead of standard paste? The latter just works like any word processor does: you copy formatted text, it pastes as formatted text unless you tell the word processor to treat it as plain-text. That is what Paste and Match does.
Now that you mention, I remember that it exists, but I always tend to forget it (probably because Scrivener is the only program that has such a feature and I am so used to hitting ctl+v). Plus, I doubt that it fixes all cases - for example, when opening a new text, I might still be hit with the wrong layout.
I this doesn’t exist, then this is probably a feature request: The ability to set a uniform font/size/tabulation that is simply applied to the entire document (including future additions).
I’m not sure what more we can do here. We have provided:
A way to set up default formatting, all the nuts and bolts of it, in the Editor options. This impacts all new documents, and for pre-existing documents, it informs the formatting used for…
The Documents/Convert/Formatting to Default Text Style. Retroactively clean up any document, to the level of specificity you require, with one command. The only thing this will not touch (by design) is inline styles like italics and such.
Edit/Paste and Match Style, which is your scorched earth formatting removal tool. Using this is identical to pasting material into Notepad and then copying and pasting it from there.
I guess my main wish would be to have the option (!) to set Edit/Paste and Match Style as the default behavior.
The other issue is kinda odd: When experimenting with this, I noticed that, when creating a new text, it actually inherits some of the settings of the last text. So for instance, even if you have indentation set as the default, the new text will have NO indentation when you right-click on the title of an existing text that has no indentatons either, and go ADD->NEW TEXT. So that is probably what drove me insane - somehow I got the wrong layout into my work (see above), and this way it was spreading like a disease.
The odd thing is that I just set paragraph spacing in the default settings, and now the above behavior is gone - i.e. when creating a new page, it actually gets all the default settings (paragraph spacing AND indentation), like I believe it should. Sneaky little bug - if I notice it again, maybe I find a way to reproduce it more reliably.
It seems just as logical to have the option to make this happen as the default, rather then having to right click.
Most of the time I want the match style option, so right clicking and choosing it is just another needless mouse click.
If I wanted it to paste “as-is”, I could always right click to choose that.
Most people probably use one more than the other. So having the option to choose which is the default is always going to save some time, whichever one they opt for.
This command would be ideal, except that it destroys hyperlinks. So it’s unusable for the vital task of cleaning up our most ragged material, the note fragments we’ve pasted in from the web.
While it’s not pretty in the editor, there’s one other point at which formatting can get cleaned up; compile. You can change any font, indentation, or tab stop setting in compile without having to first clean up the text in your individual documents. This is also handy in that there is one place where you can non-destructively change any of those settings; it won’t affect the original text, won’t accidentally strip out any formatting (like paste & match style does to bold, italic, links, etc…).
If you do not want the shift key on the plain-text paste, that is simple enough to change in the Keyboard options pane. “Paste” could be set to [b]Shift-Ctrl-V[/b] and “Paste and Match Style” to [b]Ctrl-V[/b]. Personally I just got used to adding the shift key years ago, so I don’t even really think about it. I just use the right shortcut for the job—but that is just me, this is why we have options.
Could you file a separate bug report on this with a reproduction case? That definitely should not be happening. Hyperlinks of any kind are considered inline formatting, and should be preserved as bold or italics would be.
