Thinking behind using "No Style" by default?

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iandol's Avatar

iandol

04 Mar, 2017 05:53 AM

Tip: For body text, it’s generally best to use “No Style”.

This is from the S3 tutorial. I'm just curious why you think that the body text shouldn't be styled for most users, does it just ensure maximum compatibility on compile? I ask because your Styles Compile feature is easier to understand if you style body text with a style everything is explicit).

I was looking at your Manuscript (Times) format and I can't see where "No Style" text is transformed from Palatino in the Tutorial to Times in the output (e.g. ODT). Is it the case that "No Style" text is given a Body style at compile automatically (which would explain how the font substitution occurs)?

p.s. btw inline styles do not get converted, at least if you compile the tutorial, thus Manuscript (Times) does not actually override all fonts by default.

  1. 1 brookter's Avatar brookter on 05 Mar, 2017 11:03 AM

    I thought the same way initially, but after a while came to feel "No style" was simpler and better.

    You already have to set the default body text either in General Preferences or in Project Settings/Formatting and this becomes "No Style" (cmd-opt-0). Having another place to specify the default paragraph would be an unnecessary extra step and possibly a source for confusion. Of course, there's nothing to stop you doing it if you want.

    Whether renaming "No Style" to "Default Style" might make this more obvious, I don't know.

  2. 2 iandol's Avatar iandol on 05 Mar, 2017 11:49 AM

    I agree that "Default Style" may be more understandable, if it is supposed to inherit the current default formatting (however see point 2 below).

    So I'm still somewhat confused by:

    1. I can't see how the Manuscript (Times) compile format can transform "No Style" text to use Times New Roman, there is no visible setting in that Format that does that that as far as I can see (I maybe missing it)?
    2. If I ensure Project Settings>Formatting is OFF and set up main Prefs>Editing>Formatting default to a Sans-Serif font in an already existing project, then I turn a "Body" styled (Serif font) paragraph to a "No Style" it does not revert to the Prefs>Editing>Formatting (Sans-Serif), but keeps the Serif font. I don't know if this is a bug or intended behaviour?

    I suppose i would expect if you set a paragraph to "No Style" and it is supposed to default to Prefs>Editing>Formatting, it would use what is currently set up there?

  3. 3 brookter's Avatar brookter on 05 Mar, 2017 04:31 PM

    I could be wholly wrong in this, so if I were you I'd wait till someone from support gives a definitive answer...

    But I think that the idea is that the provided Layouts have baked in settings, so the transformation is a hidden setting. You can make some customisations with the provided formats allowed: e.g. you can change the fonts from the section layout default (use the drop down list at the top of Section Layouts in Compile), but the default itself is hidden. But basically, they're provided broadly speaking to work out of the box without too much fiddling..

    If you need anything more than that, then you use the 'Duplicate and Edit Format' button (on the + sign below the list of formats). do that and a new dialog becomes available, where you can change absolutely everything about the format — including everything about the section formats. That dialog allows you to assign and change the formatting of Styles as well.

    For the second question: wouldn't you do what we did in v2 -- use Documents > Convert > Convert to Default Formatting. I.e. the default formatting is not retrospective and you have to convert old documents?

  4. 4 keith's Avatar keith on 05 Mar, 2017 05:24 PM

    "Default Style" would be a misnomer: choosing "No Style" *removes* any style information from the text (a style being a piece of meta-data associated with a block of text that can be told to format it in a particular way). "Style" is not the same as "Formatting". Text without a style applied can still be formatted in any way whatsoever, but it has no named, particular Style associated with it.

    The way to think of it is this: you format your text however you want. The default formatting is defined in the Preferences (or Project Settings if you've overridden the default for the project). On Compile, this formatting is overridden by Section Layouts (this is where formatting is overridden in the MS (Times) output).

    This is all exactly the same as it was in 2.x (except that Section Layouts have replaced 2.x's level-based "Formatting" pane). However, the problem in 2.x was that if you had sections of text that needed formatting differently - a block quote, say - Compile's overrides would alter that, too (there were a bunch of checkboxes such as "Preserve indents when overriding formatting" to try to work around this). Whereas in 3.0:

    - You set up your Section Layouts to override the text formatting - to format titles and to set the formatting for base text.

    - If you have sections of text that need different formatting, you use Styles for them, and then set up the "Styles" pane in your Compile format to override those styles (if you want them different from in the text itself).

    Upon Compile, Scrivener first applies the formatting defined in Section Layouts to the text, and then it reapplies any styles (from the Compile settings if the styles in the text are overridden in the Compile format, otherwise using the Styles settings from he project).

    If you use a "Body" style or similar for all your text, then the Section Layout formatting of Compile will be overridden by the "Body" style, and you might not get the results you want. So in general, Styles should be used for sections of text you want different from the rest of the text. If you prefer to apply a style to everything, though, that's fine, as long as you create overrides for that style in Compile if you want to override the formatting. It's pointless to do so, though.

  5. keith closed this discussion on 05 Mar, 2017 05:24 PM.

  6. iandol re-opened this discussion on 06 Mar, 2017 12:50 AM

  7. 5 iandol's Avatar iandol on 06 Mar, 2017 12:50 AM

    OK, that was the part of the puzzle I was clearly missing. I ignored the Custom Format Editor>Section Layouts>No Style>Formatting — as personally I always compile to MMD I just treated section layouts are title and.or text logic, and just blanked the formatting part!

    OK that makes more sense now in terms of the hierarchy of formatting and styles at compile, solves my (1) above. My point (2) is also slightly separate as I was curious about paragraph-level, not document level formatting in the editor. Anyway, I can't actually reproduce the behaviour I described above. If I switch from Serif to Sans-Serif font in Prefs>Default Formatting and I switch from a style back to No Style, I do now get the Sans-Serif font.

    Thanks Brookter for the neat suggestions and to Keith who somehow sounds as if he knows what he's talking about here :-P

  8. iandol closed this discussion on 06 Mar, 2017 12:50 AM.

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