Hi!
Chapter 17.3.1 Applying Styles of the user manual states: “Upon a selection: (…) If the selected text is already assigned to the designated style, the command will remove that assignment.”
I tried to change paragraph styles and character styles in this way, but I have ran into several strange situations. Writing them all down in sentences quickly became very hard to browse through, so I summarized them in a table instead. I believe I have found several bugs and inconsistencies, but it could also be that some behavior has logical explanation that I miss. Could you help me understand what is going on, pls?
To help you understand the table, I will use a sentence to describe the first test case (first row marked 1 in the leftmost column): An existing paragraph has applied paragraph style and does not have applied character style. I tried to re-apply the same paragraph style to this paragraph and the paragraph style was removed. This behavior corresponds with the user manual and should be correct.
JFYI I have also tried to use Format menu and Document/Convert… menu, but ran into more, what I believe are inconsistencies in the program behavior, and I really don’t feel like listing them all here unless there is need for it as it is quite time consuming.
Reading that, to me, it sounds like it’s describing what amounts to a toggle: select text; command will apply style to text; if style is already applied, command will remove style from text. It doesn’t describe what happens if the selection includes text that’s both styled and not – but let’s not worry about that. If I’m reading that right, that’s not the behavior I’m seeing. That kind of “selected text toggling” works with Bold and Italics and other local formatting, but not with styles. Not sure I’d expect it to, actually. Word doesn’t work that way with its styles. The only way I see to remove a style with a command is with the Remove style button. (When I have a style that I want to remove, I’ll usually select it, cut it, move the cursor back a character or two, type a space, then I do a “paste plain” of the cut text.)
I don’t know if that at all addresses what you are asking about, or your expectations of how Scrivener’s styles work. I use styles in Scrivener, but for fairly limited purposes, just a couple of heading styles, and one character style I use for comments, and they do the job ok, but I don’t count on them. Your finding inconsistencies in how styles work doesn’t surprise me all that much. Someone who uses styles more in depth might have more to say on all this.
As opposed to most users, I use styles… a lot.
Using them to “code” where I am at with the content of a chapter, almost everything is styled in my project until I reach the final draft.
Now, about your question :
Styles don’t need any selection to be applied to a paragraph (I am not talking about character styles/attributes here, but rather “normal” paragraph styles ).
Although yes, it also works with a selection of text, all you actually need is to have the cursor anywhere inside the said paragraph and select the desired style from the list,
So, to remove a style, why not simply do just that, but selecting “no style” instead ? – Seems the simplest way to me.
There is even a shortcut for it :
If you want to do it for multiple paragraphs, just first drag a selection across them and that’s it.
Thanks for your reply @Mad_Girl_Disease !
Could you specify what “Remove style button” you mean, pls? I checked the user manual and it mentions this here:
and then it mentions it here again:
and that’s it. The user manual never clearly states where it is located and I have never noticed any button titled like this.
Thx in advance!
K
Thank your for your reply @Vincent_Vincent and thanks for all the screenshots. I know they take time, yet make the message so much clearer, so appreciate it
SKIPPABLE LONG STORY:
My intention was to try and understand how Scrivener works with Styles. After many years of using MS Word with VBA, Apache/Libre Office and unnumerable other text editors, I couldn’t fail to notice that Scrivener does many things differently. I am not judgy, just trying to understand.
So the first thing I tried was to follow the user manual, which failed for me.
SKIPPABLE RANT:
I see I have failed to note this in my table above, not in my testing though. Applying No Style works in similarly inconsistent manner as outlined in the table above, but I am not going to update the table with all my testing. I have spent too much time on this already and I am not Scrivener’s QA
FINALLY TO THE POINT NOW: In case of paragraph style-only paragraph, single application of No Style removes the paragraph style. Applying No Style to SELECTED paragraph TWICE (in case of paragraph+character styles) removes both the character and paragraph styles.
Many thanks for helping me orient myself in this!
K
BTW this is what happens when user manual is so keen on describing everything with as many words as possible instead of adding pictures.
BTW #2 using this button seems to work exactly the same way as applying No Style.
(from my previous post: In case of paragraph style-only paragraph, single application of No Style removes the paragraph style. Applying No Style to SELECTED paragraph TWICE (in case of paragraph+character styles) removes both the character and paragraph styles.)
Figure 17.3, which is what the list this quote was pulled from is discussing, all of which is found within the subsection specifically describing the styles panel. That list is going through the screenshot and describing it in top-down fashion. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, that illustrations are good and we should use as many as we can, but this was probably not a good example to pull from, seeing as how it is an implementation of precisely what you suggest we should do!
Otherwise, the main issue with this topic, specifically, is that there are a number of known bugs with how style application and removal works. Big thanks for the table by the way, I have it on my list to go over and make sure we have all of these variations documented. As for how bugs pertain to documentation—sadly yes, sometimes things can get confusing if a bug causes observed behaviour to disagree with described behaviour. There aren’t too many good solutions to that problem, but I mainly use an approach of omitting text that clearly describes nothing correctly, and leaving an edit marking tied back to the ticket. So the biggest issue is patchy descriptions or undocumented features.
P.S. Check your revision number on the copyright page. The latest revision is 3.1.1-03, and it may be there were some adjustments in this area, as the paragraph you listed at the bottom of page 367 is now a full page away from that spot.
Someone who uses styles more in depth might have more to say on all this.
