Had a question about text formatting in scrivener. I’m trying to type my notes for classes. Instead of making outlines with the list function, I prefer to indent each line manually.
I keep running into issues trying to get the document to print the way I want it to. Every time the window is resized the text wrapping is thrown off, which throws off my indenting (and thus drives me crazy). And figuring out how to get the window to be the exact page size isn’t working well either. Essentially, I’d just like a WYSIWG-like interface. I see the benefits of the compile draft function to selectively format, but for this particular scenario it’d be easier for me to just be able to have WYSIWYG.
I’ve been trying to figure this out on my own for the past couple of days and am finally giving in to asking the all-knowing creator. Help? Thanks!
All-knowing creator I am not, but I think the easiest way to do this is with a little experimentation. There are three tools you can use to approximate page width. In General Preferences, the default editor width can be adjusted, and when Fixed Width is checked (right next to that), you will get something that looks a bit like a Kerouac style page. The second tool is visual margins. These are in the Text Editing preference pane, at the bottom. The third tool is editor zoom (footer bar of the main application). You can probably come up with something pretty close to print preview for width. Of course, there is no height calculation, so it will still be one long strip.
But an aside: How are you indenting? I have never had word-wrap mess up my indents before. Are you using the Ruler to set up indents or are you manually pressing enter after every line and then tab?
Thanks for the quick reply. Setting the default editor width (fixed) to 518 seems to be the best approximation of print preview I could get. I do manual margins, that is, hitting return and indenting each line. It’s a habit I picked up from Word jacking up every outline I made (this was the easiest way to minimize damages). Is there an easier way you’d recommend?
The only downside is that I can’t zoom without messing the entire setup, but going into full screen mode and messing with the page width there while setting the text to 200% seems to work ok.
I’m thinking I might keep my default settings to approximate print preview and use compile draft selectively if I want to change things.
Thanks again for the help! This really is an amazing program.
Right, as Katherine suggests, using the Ruler is the preferred way to adjust things like indent and, outdent, and so forth. Press Cmd-R, and if you are not accustomed to the little tools there, all of the right-arrows are tab stops. You can drag them around to adjust those, or off of the rule to remove them. The two down-arrows on the far right and left adjust margins. But the left margin is adjusted with two controls: The down-arrow and the solid bar above it. To do a full indent you’ll want to drag both of these inward a cm or so, otherwise you’ll get a first-line indent or outdent depending on which you drag.
This is a lot of work to simply indent, so what I suggest is, after getting things set up the way you like, make sure the cursor is in the indented paragraph, and then from the “Styles” menu in the ruler, select “Other…” Click “Add to Favorites” and give it a name. Now whenever you want to indent, you can access that style from this menu.