Does Scrivener 2.3.1 support adding extra spacing between paragraphs? I’ve long been accustomed to adding a few points of space after each paragraph. The docs in 15.4 Formatting Tools, Page 198 omits any mention of this capability.
Appreciated.
Yeah, that section does gloss over it rather too briefly, I’ll fix that up. Paragraph spacing is kind of tucked away under the spacing tool drop-down in the Format Bar. It’s the second to the right. The easy choices are all simple universal line spacing, you want the “Other” choice at the bottom which presents the full spacing model setup.
Naturally you’ll probably want to do this in your Formatting preferences pane so it can be universally applied.
When I did a search on “stylesheets” a lot of CSS stylesheets references were returned plus a couple of Scrivener specifics that more or less implied that Scrivener doesn’t do stylesheets. Having gone through that whole section on formatting tools, the structure felt really convoluted, decentralized and unclear. I would love to see Scrivener stylesheets bring it all together. Familiar territory. MS Word, QuarkXPress and most other modern text processing apps. A strong nudge to your development team.
Thanks for the “Other” tip. Will check it out in the morning.
Appreciated.
Styles in the pure sense are definitely something we’ve given a lot of thought to and wish to implement eventually. It’s a tricky problem because the text engine provided by the Mac is wholly ignorant of styles, so really any system we come up with will have to be rolled together from scratch. I do agree that it is a fairly essential modern technology, but that aside whatever we do implement will need to be somewhat out of the way so only those that really want it can benefit from it. I think styles that get in the way of those that couldn’t care less for that sort of stuff just increase the complexity of software. So knowing that Scrivener is purely visual formatting only should help you grasp the documentation in that section a bit better. Everything is just what you see. You use a preset, it changes the formatting like a macro and that is it. The tools are all situational and contextual, not global. It’s the difference between many months of coding and testing and “flipping a switch” so to speak. A lot of the formatting tools you see are built-in and require little effort to enable. It’s something that has allowed Keith to focus on the more organisational and meta-writing features of the software, rather than dwelling on document formatting code.
Understood and I agree with your priorities.
Your system actually works very like the one in Pages. That’s very good news, been using Pages for years. Frankly that’s all I really need. Select a block of text and apply the preset.
Much thanks.
Yup! The only major difference is that in Pages if you go and manually change the preset itself, all of the blocks that had that preset applied to them will update. This will not happen in Scrivener. That’s the part we want to improve eventually. But from a usability standpoint, if all you do is pick from the style choices and never mess with the fundamental definitions, it’s pretty much identical.