Presumably this is a bug, as italics and bolds are not as often considered elements of text style as they are structure, or formatting. An argue for structured plaintext? Perhaps, but either way: might it be possible to preserve your bolds, your underlines, etc, and still match face, leading, margins?
You definitely do have a point in that inline styles generally are a form of information, similar if not nearly equal to punctuation. But, I would say there are two primary uses for this function: Collection and Transfer. Transfer would be when you are moving your own created data around. In these instances, it does make quite a bit of sense to retain style information. But in the realm of collection, I very nearly never wish to retain the stylistic information provided by the author. This is because I have my own systems for using style information that conflict; because the cultural standards from the author’s background are different; or because they were more interested in aesthetics than information.
In the latter case, I’d rather take the text down to the base. Lacking the ability to easily do that would be frustrating.
Oh, and a way to get around the need for conforming ruler settings to pasted text without messing with the font is to use a Ruler style set up to your default preference.
Hi, this is not actually a bug - or, at least, it is not a Scrivener bug. “Paste and Match Style” is actually implemented by Apple in their text system, so it works exactly the same in Scrivener as it does in TextEdit and other applications that use the Cocoa text system. If you don’t like this behaviour, I heartily suggest you register and post at bugreport.apple.com, where you can suggest Apple change it. In issues such as this I am committed to being consistent with other programs that have such features, although I do agree that you have a point here. I guess the reason Apple implemented it this way, incidentally, is because, the way the Cocoa text system works, even bold and italics are, internally, considered to be styles (“attributes”, in Apple coding jargon).
All the best,
Keith