Revealing Styles

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

How do you go about revealing the styles assigned within a Scrivener document?
Thanks,
ScotK

2

Hi,

Could you explain more about what you are trying to do? Scrivener doesn’t have any true knowledge of styles - that is, the text itself doesn’t hold any named styles.

All the best,
Keith

3

Thanks, Keith,

I’ve imported text, new chapters, and now I want to apply the same styles to the various components. Unfortunately not all the current style names are intuitive, so I am left to guess what the benchmark style is. I tried highlighting a block of text and opening the /Styles/ menu, but it doesn’t seem to give any indication of the style attributed to the highlighted text.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Peace,

ScotK

4

Hi,

Scrivener just uses the OS X styles sheet there, the same one they provide in TextEdit. It would probably be better if I just dropped it from the application altogether, as it’s misleading and, frankly, rubbish. All it does is allow you to save some formatting and give it a name - its more a “favourite formatting” feature, really, and calling it “Styles” isn’t quite right (Apple’s name for the “feature”, not mine), as it can’t do anything users associate with styles features in word processors. In styles-based word processors, the text itself knows what style is associated with it, and changing a style will update the associated text. In non-styles based text systems, such as Scrivener’s, the text just has formatting (bold, italics, lien spacing etc), but no style name or identity associated with it, so there is no way of updating multiple chunks of text at once.

If you just want to convert all text documents to have Scrivener’s default formatting, you can select the documents and use Text > Convert > Formatting > to Default Style, but there is no way of updating chunks of text within each document with a particular style, if that makes sense, because Scrivener’s text system isn’t styles-based.

All the best,
Keith

5

Thanks. At least I will stop looking for that styles feature.

ScotK

6

There’s a fairly rubbish but sometimes-useful feature in OS X’s styles pane that allows you to select all instances in a document that match a particular set of attributes, via Styles > Other > Favourites > Select. It’s not anywhere near as good as simply showing which style has been applied, which doesn’t really happen anyway (since the attributes are simply painted on the text each time they’re “applied”, i.e. they’re not really applied), but it might do in a pinch.