I use a lot of different font colours in my stories - to tell me to rewrite, insert, clarify the text etc. I realise that this is adding invisible formatting to the document (if it works anyway like markup languages). What is the best way to strip out all the formatting go back to an clean document or am I worry needlessly?
Yes, since colour is such an effective writing & editing tool, there is a feature built into the Compiler that can strip all colour-based markings out of the exported copy, leaving your editorial marks intact in the project. You could also of course strip them out of the source text, but unless you yourself want a cleaner look, there is no big need for that.
The feature is in the Transformations compile option pane, Remove text color, in the lower half of the pane.
If your concern is based on stability, I wouldn’t worry about it. Text colour is a pretty simple thing in terms of internal markup (which is by the way RTF), and overall even into more complicated formatting, Scrivener is pretty stable in these regards. I would confidently say that nearly all formatting glitches that arise in Scrivener are a consequence of oddities from other programs, like Word, making their way into its files (via copy and paste or import). If you write every word from scratch in Scrivener then you are quite safe (and I would be quick to add that for most things you’re safe copying and pasting as well—the issues I refer to are rather rare and usually very easy to fix, like doubled-up list bullets).
Thanks for you reply AmberV. The way I have been accomplishing what I want is to select the entire text of the document and changing it all to the highlight colour then a second click to make it all black but I realise that every time I do this, I’m add yet more formatting.
There are options in the Format Menu/Highlight/Remove Color and Format/Revision Mode/Remove Revisions. Neither of these remove my colours as I would expect. I’m not concerned about post compile as I will be compiling for Kindle anyway.
There is no menu command for removing text colour, so to properly strip them from the editor you need to right-click on the text colour button in the Format Bar. There you will find a “remove colour” swatch in the top left corner.
These are for commands for other features though. Highlights are like fluorescent markers—they are the “highlight” behind the text, and have nothing to do with the text colour itself. Revision Modes do indeed use text colour, but they are a special feature that works with a limited set of colours and those alone. They very intentionally do not manipulate coloured text that does not match one of the five colours that are used by this feature.
The user manual has more information on the different textual markings you can make, and the differences between them, in §18.4 and §18.5, starting on page 261.