Hi, I’m new and using Scrivener 3 for mac. I’m also almost computer illiterate so would be grateful for non technical responses, if possible.
I’ve read and watched the tutorials but can’t find the answers to my problem (I’m sure they’re in there somewhere!)
I’m using Scrivener mostly for writing novels and having difficulties inserting indents for dialogue. When I paste a Word document I’ve written into a new Scrivener novel project I don’t seem to be able to format the tabs, indents and single spacing.
I have the ruler showing but any tabs and indents I’ve set disappear when pasting the document.
Also, can I change single spacing to double when I’m compiling.
I hope I’ve managed to make this understandable and would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.
When pasting text from another formatted source, like Word, you are copying with it all of its settings—that includes the ruler. Sometimes that is exactly what you want, but in cases where you want to clean up the formatting we have a few tools you can make use of.
For systematic formatting—if all quotes you use are meant to be formatting a special way, you might want to create a style for yourself. Styles make it easy to (a) have a consistent look throughout the work and (b) change your mind later on, since redefining a style will go back and reformat all text assigned to that style.
It’s really easy to set up: format one example paragraph the way you want it to look, then with the cursor in that paragraph use the Format ▸ Style ▸ New Style from Selection… command. For indents and tabs alone, you will probably want to only save paragraph formatting, and leave the font checkboxes off. The rest of the settings in that panel you could leave default, though adding a shortcut could be good for something as commonly used as dialogue.
Yes, though if you want that, you might find our built-in manuscript (Times New Roman or Courier, as you require) Formats (in the left sidebar of the compile overview screen) to be good selections, as they will perform other tweaks to bring the output up to common standards, in addition to double-spacing. In fact if you started out with one of the fiction or general non-fiction templates, you may find everything works the way it should by default.
Thank you very much. That’s really helpful and easy to understand 
Just what I needed, THANKS!
Great mnen
I really like it