Styles and Formatting

There are several handy new features in the Format menu.

Accessing Styles

The new Style submenu has replaced Presets. The main difference is that Scrivener now remembers which style was applied to a block of text and allows you to automatically update all affected text blocks when updating a style (much like in Microsoft Word). Styles are also available from the same location as the old Presets drop-down menu in the Format bar, or via Format>Style.

Keep in mind that Styles are not intended to be applied to all text, just anything that needs to look different from the main body text of your manuscript.

Pasting Paragraph Attributes

You might already be familiar with the Format>Copy Formatting/Paste Formatting commands (which copy both the character and paragraph settings of the selected text), or the Format>Font>Copy Font/Paste Font options (which copy only character settings), but now there’s a new set of options that makes it easy to copy and paste only the paragraph attributes (e.g. indents, line spacing, before/after paragraph spacing) without grabbing the text attributes (e.g. font, typeface, font size). You’ll find the new paragraph options under Format>Paragraph>Copy Paragraph Attributes and Format>Paragraph>Paste Paragraph Attributes.

The image below shows examples of the three different types of formatting applied when copied from the document on the right.

Examples of pasted font, formatting, and paragraph attributes

Setting Default Formatting

The Format>Make Formatting Default option provides a quick way to make the format of the currently-selected text in the Editor the default for all new documents. You can choose to have it apply to the current project (same as Project>Project Settings>Formatting) or to all projects (same as File>Options>Editing>Formatting).