Quick question about Scrivener 3 for Windows and compiling.
I’m using a custom Compile format with “Override text and notes formatting” enabled. Body text and headings compile exactly as expected, but numbered lists don’t. The numbers come through with a different font and I don’t see a way to set list item spacing and indent, the way you can set font and line spacing for paragraphs and headings.
I’ve looked through Section Layouts and Text Layout options, but on Windows I’m not seeing any way to control list formatting during compile.
Is this a known limitation on Windows?
Mainly checking that I’m not missing something obvious.
Lists are deliberately avoided when it comes to section layout formatting overrides, since in 99% of cases that isn’t what you’d want, you wouldn’t want lists to have the same paragraph shape as normal paragraphs (and most people don’t break out to a new binder item just a for a list so it can have a special section type! If you like to detail your outline to that level, cool, but you shouldn’t have to).
The better tool for the job is paragraph styles, applied to the lists themselves in the editor. That way you can then go into the Styles compile format option pane, add your “List” style from the project, and tweak the ruler from there. You’ll find it imports the standard bullet ruler into the Styles pane, making it a little easier to work with. You do want to follow how it is set up, with tab stops lined up with the indent markers like that; just move them together to adjust the relative spacing between bullet and flush left, and between the text hang and the bullet. You can also get into line-height, font size, and other particulars here too.
Of course the main downside of overriding list formatting in any fashion is that it makes multi-level formatting impossible (at least not without making your life a bit of a hassle with creating a style for each level). But that isn’t really a Scrivener problem so much as a conceptual one. I assume if you want to blanket override list formatting you’ve got single-level lists.
Just be wary of the fragility of lists in general. I would say overall that applying styles to lists is less tested. In theory it should be fine, but there is more complexity going on to store both the list formatting and Scrivener’s style declarations on top of it. Take snapshots/backups before implementing them widespread, and see how it goes.