I recently brought in a lengthy document into Scrivener, and broke it into dozens of sections within one project. I’ve realized now that the custom line height in various parts of the project is larger than what it should be. Is there any way in SCV to search for either line height, or font size? I didn’t see this criteria listed under search by format settings.
If you’re just trying to get the line-heights all the same, you can use Documents/Convert/Convert Formatting to Default Text Style, and set up the options the way you want so you don’t blow away block quotes or anything. The default text style, if you’ve never messed with it, is located in the Formatting preference pane. That is what the document will look like when you run that command with all formatting updated.
If however the problem is that you’ve got some sections that do need special line-height settings, and just want to find and fix them, then I can’t think of an easy way to do that. There aren’t any advanced format search tools in Scrivener.
Thanks for the insights. I’m afraid my situation is the later one you described. I have random places where I need the line height to be smaller than the rest of the document. There are maybe 12-25+ of these throughout each document in my project. Hmmm …
Apparently, Scrivener offers no way to search for Font Sizes.
Can you do that in the original word processor? If so, search for the sections of interest, search for the first phrase of that section in Scrivener, adjust your text however you need to, and then repeat.
Thanks, this could be done, but we’re talking about over a hundred of these edits in just one of my projects. Let me explain, and while you might wonder why I’m explaining, it’s to see how I can go forward with my future work in Scrivener.
I use a technical writing style, which breaks things down in short, useful chunks. Here’s a simplistic example:
To use this feature you need to:
• Open the File menu
• Select Page Setup
• Change the Left Margin to .5 inches
For each of the carriage returns, between the indented items above, I use a 5 point line (not what is shown above). So, while the body text is 11 point, the line height between each indented item is 5 points.
So far - and I admit I’m brand new to using Scrivener - I have to select each paragraph return between items and manually reduce the line height to 5 points. Needless to say this is quite tedious, especially when I do this maybe a dozen times on each page.
Are there tools in SCV that can automate this process for me?
There are text presets. I don’t use them much, but you can select text and apply them with a menu selection. And, like all mac programs, you can create keyboard shortcuts for any menu item that you use a lot. You could accomplish the indent changes by using paragraph indentations using the ruler (which I believe are saved as part of a custom text presets. The menu for this stuff is under Format->Formatting, and I’m sure there’s some illuminating info in the manual on the subject.
I’m no expert, as my formatting needs are quite limited, but maybe that’ll help?
Note that if you let Scrivener override most of your text during compile, you may want to look into the occasional use of the “as-is” document setting, or the “preserve formatting” marker. Or you can just not allow Scrivener to override your text formatting at all in the Formatting pane, and not bother with either of those.
Formatting presets are exactly what you are looking for it sounds like. One important thing to note about Scrivener, and it sounds like you may have already picked up on this, is that it has no concept of stylesheets. Formatting presets are our compromise. They don’t all link together, and you don’t “assign” them to text, they are just stored formatted characteristics that you can use to “paint” selections of text with. You can read more about them in §15.4.3, pg. 209–11.
They will store the current level of list bullet type being used, too. So if this style only appears in lists, you can save that aspect into the preset as well and reduce your tool use to one single tool, which, as Robert mentioned, can be assigned a custom shortcut if you are fond of using those.
As for compilation, if you do intend to use the compiler to clean up formatting, do know it is possible to selectively disable aspects of that override. Since you are paying careful attention to line-height, you could disable that part of the override in the compiler, but have it change the font, first-line indent and other aspects. That’s all optional of course. You can just shut the whole thing down and it will output as you see precisely in the editor (for applicable output formats, obviously).
Sorry, I never responded to your helpful information. Although I was not able to perform this 'universally, as I had hoped, I was able to create a custom line-height format, assign a keyboard combination to it, and manually make the changes needed.
More importantly, I am now able to easily build future documents with the custom line heights they require.
Thanks!