So I was goofing around with the presets in the Formatting Preference pane just for giggles, and I found that if I selected a preset that included “preserve formatting,” e.g. the Essay Block Quote (Preserved), there appears to be no way to remove that “preserve formatting” box from the default Main Text Style pane–it, naturally enough, preserves it through all the other presets and the option is grayed out if you go to deselect it through the menu (Format>Formatting>Preserve Formatting).
Other than selecting a chunk of text from my project and hitting “use current,” is there a way to reset this?
Heh, whoops. It probably shouldn’t let you do that. I can think of no reason why anyone should want the Preserve Formatting attribute applied to everything by default. That is what Compile As-Is is for.
But yes, looks like selecting something “clean” and clicking Use Current is the only way out of that trap.
Heh. Nor could I, and actually I think that this explains a tech problem someone posted a few days ago, where they’d accidentally set preserve formatting and it was applying to new documents. I couldn’t figure out why new documents would pick it up…but I see it is possible to set that.
I don’t know if there’s anything to do about this, but I think what may be happening in some cases (like the above, potentially, and another case I’ve seen) is that people are attempting to define the presets via the Fomatting pane. I don’t know that it would necessarily be a good idea to remove the preset list from that pane entirely, even if it’s possible, but…I don’t know, I can’t really think of a case where someone would want to make a preset the default for all text. And if you did, you could do it by selecting the properly formatted text in the editor and using the “use current” option. It might be an extra step, but it might also save a lot of headaches for people misusing the preset list there–you’d have to be deliberate about it and know what you were doing, for one thing. But I don’t know, I rarely use presets anyway except for academic stuff, so I’m probably biased.
In the condensed Format Bar, use the Presets menu to select any preset with Preserve Formatting attached to it; the default Essay Block Quote works fine
Select another Preset at random; Preserve Formatting sticks.
Only way to clear it is to click the Use Current button. Also tested Use Current on a paragraph that has Preserve Formatting on it, but Scrivener rightly scrubs that out of the mix; so you might just need to apply the same filter to preset actions.
Before I do that, could you please take a look and see if there are any other formatting attributes that shouldn’t be allowed to be set as part of the preferences? Annotation and footnote, for instance - I don’t think these are prohibited either.
Oh, yeah, and asking you to do this and reply here is partly just because there’s no way of asking the forum to mark a post as “unread”, and I’m not on my development machine and am too lazy to e-mail myself right now.
Selecting from the editor and applying via “use current”:
Highlight color, text color, revision text color all get set.
Tables don’t SEEM to get set actually, but the border appears in the text pane in the preferences–it just doesn’t seem to actually carry over to a new document.
The ruler settings of lists get set, but the bullets don’t.
Footnotes and annotations don’t save.
If you create presets with all the above and then apply via the preset, the results ultimately are the same but the text box in the preference pane will show the footnote and annotation bubble/box and background coloring, though they don’t actually “take.”
A few more results from Presets, unless otherwise stated:
I was able to get inline annotations and footnotes into the formatting window. The preset must have all properties saved into it, and it must be added with the preset drop-down in formatting, not with Use Current. As with Preserve Formatting, once you trigger this case it sticks no matter what. And yeah, I noticed tables are wonky too, they do end up as an actual table in the formatting preview area (if you right-click, you can add columns and other fun things), but they don’t propagate fortunately.
Table cells also come in via “Use Current” button.
I think text colour/revisions and highlights are fine to leave. Highlights is a bit weird, but text colour definitely for people that prefer to work in anything other than black on white.
Probably no good way around the ruler settings for lists, as that is technically valid information. At least the bullet doesn’t come in from either Use Current or Presets (lists don’t get saved in the latter, anyway).
While you are digging around in here, I noticed OpenType stuff doesn’t get saved. If you change ligatures, old figures, or other typographic features in the font palette, they don’t stick.
Anyway they can all be set in the format bar right there in the pane, so it doesn’t really make a difference.
Also, this is completely unrelated but it’s entertaining me–is there are method to your use of “colour” vs. “color”? I notice the manual has both and I haven’t decided if I think there’s a secret system behind it, or if it’s just the madness of British/American collaboration. But then I use “gray” and “grey” both for different things, because I happen to think “grey” is so much nicer looking…but things I don’t like are “gray.” I decided that at some point in elementary school when I first learned about spelling variations and I haven’t been able to shake it.
I’m a mess when it comes to that, but I’ve attempted to stick with one standard for the manual so it isn’t terribly strange, and I’ve cut out some of my idiosyncratic fondnesses, such as the legacy spelling for “connexion”. So unless I made a mistake, the manual should all be British spellings except when addressing a specific piece of interface, which is all American English. So you’ll see such monstrosities as "To reset the colour of the index card background to default, click Use Default Color".
Incidentally, it spits up in console when you, in the Formatting preference pane, use a preset created from text linking to an inspector comment or footnote, and repeats this when you switch to another preset. Just using the preset normally within the editor doesn’t get this.
This is a separate issue and one I can’t do anything about - Apple don’t seem to save this info in NSFont. I archive all of the formatting as passed to the text view.
