I’m not a word processing expert, but to the best of my knowledge there isn’t a really good way of adding additional paragraphs to a single bullet point. The best technique I’ve seen, that preserve the integrity of the list, is the result that is produced by Pandoc’s DOCX generator, when requested to do so. It sets the secondary paragraph’s bullet style to a space character, thus rendering the marker invisible. Semantically that approach doesn’t feel like a good one to me—it’s then more list items, not one list item with multiple paragraphs—but that seems to be how word processing approaches that (and many other) problems: just make it look right at whatever cost.
That said, Scrivener has no such facility on its own, lists can only have one marker type, and in the Windows version you can’t even set custom markers. So I guess you could follow that same principle though, where if we are going to abandon logical formatting and just try to make it look right:
- Pretend its a list instead of actually making a list. Create a paragraph ruler style with some tab stops and line indenting then type in the bullets by hand (consider creating a substitution to insert the bullet markers more easily).
- Subsequent paragraphs are then just tabbed twice, skipping over the middle tab stop where the marker would be typed.
The next best way I know of is to insert line breaks (Insert ▸ Break ▸ Line Break). The main problem with the approach is that separate lines within a “paragraph” (or bullet line in this case) only share the overall line-height setting for the paragraph. Paragraph padding added before or after applies to the whole paragraph, not lines within it. Thus to introduce any kind of vertical spacing you need to insert multiple line breaks, which may break the overall look of the document if such spaces are not used otherwise. The same limitations come up for first-line indent settings, which again apply to the whole paragraph, not individual lines within them.
lists_with_paragraphs.zip (159.6 KB)
So if you compile the attached sample project, using the given settings, you will see the two possible methods demonstrated. The “Modern Spacing” compile format demonstrates how the line-break method can work, provided the overall look of the document uses spacing for paragraphs rather than indents. If we are spacing paragraphs apart anyway, than the empty lines introduced within the bullet line fit in perfectly. The first method, of creating a pseudo-list, also works fine with this kind of formatting.
The second test, “Modern Indents”, shows where the line-break method breaks down. You’d probably have to clean up lists created this way in your word processor after compiling. If you flip to the pseudo-list though, you can see how we could format the style used for that independently from the body text, and thus have more control over it, making it look good in the overall document.
Like I said, I’m not an expert at this though, maybe someone will come along with a better idea.
