I’m a little new to Scrivener. I transferred a lot of non-fiction writing from a word file into multiple documents. For some reason, the no-style style didn’t take hold because when using the dark theme, the text in the documents is black on the dark grey background, which is hard to see. All I want is the text to become white so I can see it properly. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to affect the text style in multiple documents in a single step. Is this so?
Documents > Convert > Text to default formatting
But first set your Default formatting in File > Options > Edit > Formatting
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You don’t actually want your text white.
You need it to be of the default color so it’ll adapt to the background.
You’ll see it as white, but it’ll switch to black on its own on a white background.
Default font color is the tiny box with a diagonal line across it, top left, in the font color picker.
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Thanks for responding.
Yes. I’ve seen this before in other products. I want the font color to naturally contrast with the background. So I did what Antoni suggests, first setting the default formatting. And I chose the little slashed box in the color picker. Then, with a single document in the binder selected, I did the Documents>Convert>Text to default formatting thing. The margins changed as a I wanted, but the text color seems to be stuck. If I select the text in the document and choose “no style” from the style menu, it turns to white on dark and to dark on white, depending on my theme choice. Quite frustrating.
Yes, a style, any style, overrides the default (no style) formatting.
You’ll have to redefine your styles as well.
For a paragraph style:
Select a paragraph that won’t comply.
Make the font of the default color.
Now with it selected, go to Format\Style\Redefine, and pick the style from the list. Hit ok, changing nothing in the popup.
For a character attributes style:
It is the same, but you have to be careful what you select. Italics, bold etc.
It is a bit touchy.
BACKUP YOUR PROJECT FIRST.
Alternatively, you could simply do nothing stylewise, select all of your document’s text (ctrl-a), then set the font color.
Thanks, Vincent.
I followed your steps that conclude with Format->Style->Redefine but there isn’t a style that I want to use for this. I want “no style” to use the proper font color (to contrast with the background) and it’s not available for redefinition in that dialog.
This is apparently not going to be easy. Your idea of selecting all the text and changing it’s style (to no style) doesn’t seem to work. When I go to the documents’ parent folder and chose Scrivening in the view menu to see all their text, Cntrl-A doesn’t select all the text, just the text of the document that the cursor is sitting in. If I go to each text chunk in the Scrivening view to stepwise select all the text, choosing “no style” from the style dropdown (upper left in text window), nothing happens; the black on dark grey remains wherever it still occurs.
I’m beginning to think that all my importing I did to create my project was a little premature - that I should have created a much smaller project to experiment with, perhaps re-importing a few times with various options set, to get everything to work properly before ambitiously importing the large amounts of text that I have. While I’m not a big fan of throwing away effort, I’m a huge fan of mastering and controlling tools like this instead of having them control me.
You have to set your default formatting, in the options, to use the default font color.
You said you did that, then converted a document to Default formatting.
You said you did the convert to default formatting part for one document and that it worked.
You need to do it to all of your documents.
Select them all in the binder, then:
In short, “no style” is set as it was before, until you convert the document to the (new) default formatting set in the options. It’ll remain with a black font until you do so.
Else, my suggestion wasn’t to select all text and assign it to “no style”, but to select all text, then
. . . . . . . .
As for the styles (other than “no style”) : You said you had style(s) in your editor/documents. So that is why I mentioned it. If you don’t, or don’t want styles, no problem there: just make everything “no style”.
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That is currently a limitation in the Windows version.
You indeed have to do it one document at a time…
But in this case you likely won’t have to do it at all after properly converting all of your documents to the new default formatting.
Thanks again, Vincent.
I tried both setting the font color to default using the slashed box and setting the style to no style. In both cases, when selecting multiple documents or the text in multiple documents (using the scrivening view), the only text that changes is in the document where the cursor resides - the last one I selected. The text of the previous selections (which are still selected, btw) don’t change. I’m starting to think this is a bug. It would make sense that selecting text in multiple documents in a scrivening view would allow you to affect all the selected text, but not so.
As I said just above, it is a current limitation of the Windows version.
But never mind that.
Just convert all of your draft/manuscript’s documents to default formatting, and all of the “no style” text will suddenly use the default font color.
If you don’t have styles in your documents, that should fix your issue 100%.
Note that (It just occurred to me) if you want to preserve formatting of the documents as they are currently formatted, either convert them as this:
(If you are positive you don’t want styles in there, might as well ditch them now, checking the box just below the one I highlighted. – If you didn’t yourself assign styles, there should be none anyways.)
…or go with my second suggestion. [EDIT] (It is actually a crappy suggestion, now that I think of it.)
One document at a time, select all text, then make it of the default font color.
(But any new paragraph will then use black as its font color. That’d be the downside. You’ll have to tweak them as you go, every single time.)
@AmberV The “Remove all styles” option doesn’t work.
Mac user here. On the Mac you can select the Draft/Manuscript folder and all its documents, and then go to Documents → Convert → Text to Default Formatting without clicking in the editor. It will convert all the text in all the documents. Does the same not happen in Windows.
I know in Windows in Scrivenings mode you can’t edit across document boundaries, unlike on the Mac, but working from the binder, without entering the editor…?
Mark
Yes, you can bulk convert many documents at once, no problem.
It’s hard to imagine that a Mac development tool provides better functionality than Windows, but it must be so. I have a couple of possible work-arounds, so I’m not totally stuck, just annoyed. The recommended approach to starting up with Scrivener is to just dive right in, but I maybe went a little deep with all the material I imported right off the bat without experimenting enough. I have Antoni Dol’s new book in hand, and plan to start helping others here after I get a little more comfortable with some of the darker corners of the product. Thanks Antoni and xiamenese and especially Vincent for your time and effort.
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Thanks, I’ve got that filed.
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