Indent

I am still not really used to Apple’s text engine and not sure how to accomplish indent.

All I want is to be able to change indent (margins on either side) of the document, but there are all these little > and <> and < in the ruler and it would take ages to move them all individually.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

You can save your favorite indents as styles in the cocoa ruler. Set them up once - place all the bits and pieces on the ruler and remove the unnecessary ones - then choose the styles menu on the ruler/other/add to favorites give the style a name and check “include the ruler as part of your style”. Quite frankly, it’s a crappy interface, but once you’ve gotten used to it it’s easy to create and apply different indents. You can even assign keyboard shortcuts to your styles in System Prefs.

trust that helps,

E

Wow, that sounds like a nightmare. Is there any tutorial or anything like that around anywhere?

Thanks.

The right-facing triangles (>) are tab stops. The down-facing triangles are the left and right indents. The marker that looks like a T is the first-line indent. You can set the indents where you wish and then drag the tab-stops down off the ruler to delete them. Then, do as Eiron suggests and save these settings as a style.

Dave

Ah! Since I see you feel this is nightmarish, the other thing you can do is go to the Scrivener Preferences/Text Editing and set your indents etc. there. Then, any new text files you create will have those preferences.

Dave

Though Dafu has covered the important stuff, here are the help entries from TextEdit:

[code]----------Formatting your document-------------

You can set margins, paragraph indentation, and text tabs by using the ruler in TextEdit. You can also insert page breaks and line breaks where you need them.

There are four kinds of tab stops and two types of margins, each indicated by a differently shaped icon:

A right-facing triangle indicates a tab stop at which text will be left-justified.

A diamond indicates a tab stop at which text will be centered.

A left-facing triangle indicates a tab stop at which text will be right-justified.

A circle indicates a decimal tab stop at which numbers will be justified around a decimal point.

A downward-facing triangle indicates a page margin.

A horizontal rectangle indicates the indentation of the first line of a paragraph.

To make the ruler appear (if you don’t already see it), choose Format > Text > Show Ruler.
To place a tab stop, select one from the tab stop palette on the right side of the ruler and drag it into place above the ruler, or select a stop that is already in place and drag it to a new location.
To remove a tab stop, drag it off the ruler.
To change a margin, drag the left or right margin icon to a new location.
To change the paragraph indentation, drag the indentation icon to a new location.
To add a line break, choose Edit > Insert > Line Break.
To insert a page break, choose Edit > Insert > Page Break. To remove the page break, press Delete.

----------Saving a favorite text style--------------

You can add your favorite text styles to the Styles pop-up menu for convenient document formatting. To create a style, you format text in the document and then save that formatting as a style, or you can browse through styles currently used in the document and save one as a favorite.

To add a style to the Styles pop-up menu, select some formatted text, then choose Other from the Styles pop-up menu and click Add To Favorites. Type a name for the style. If you want to use the font type shown when you apply the style, select “Include the font as part of the style.” To use the spacing and tabs in the selected text, select “Include the ruler as part of the style.”
To add a style currently used in the document as a favorite style, choose Other from the Styles pop-up menu and select Document Styles. Use the Forward and Back buttons to browse through styles used in the document until you find the one you want. Click Add To Favorites, and give the style a name. Select “Include the font as part of the style” and “Include the ruler as part of the style” if desired.
To remove a favorite style from the list, choose Other from the Styles pop-up menu, then select Favorite Styles. Choose the style you want to remove from the pop-up menu, then click Remove From Favorites. You cannot remove the Default style.
[/code]

I’m afraid I can’t make it easier than that.

Cheers,

E

Thanks.

You’re welcome! Have fun!

Dave

For some weird reason if I move the down arrow (left margin) one inch in from 0, the right margin one inch in from 8, all the text is lined up skewed to the right. I can try to adjust it but it’s almost impossible to get perfect and doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

Sorry if I’m stating the obvious, but I’m not sure if I understand the problem and it’s not clear to me how much experience you have on the mac.
I assume you realize that the ruler acts on all selected text, if there is no selection only the paragraph with the cursor in it will be affected by changes in the ruler.

If by “skewed to the right” you mean aligned on the right, is it possible you have chosen right alignment for your text? If so, select your text and click the left alignment icon on the ruler.

Is it possible that your text has some formatting imported from a web page, html etc? If so you could have hidden columns etc that screwing things up.

Again, sorry if you already know all this, but I’m unclear why you’re having this problem. If I’m way off base, could you describe the issue in a bit more detail?

Cheers,

E

It’s not any of that. I start a new document in Scrivener, write a few paragraphs of text, and then in the export formatting pane I change the ruler settings so that the starting and ending margins should be about an inch, etc. indented. Unfortunately, when I print the export it is not lined up evenly as I’ve done with the ruler, but rather the left indent is much larger than it should be so the two margins are not even.

Selecting your document and running the menu Documents/Convert Formatting/To Export Text Style should at least give you a preview of how your export should look, depending on the settings in the Export Draft/Formatting tab. Maybe that will help.

Beyond that I’ll have to pass this one off to someone who knows more about exporting.

Sorry,

E

Maybe I’m missing something but if you want to change the margins for a paragraph, you need to move the downward triangles, the first (for left margin) and last (for right margin). Nothing else. Just to check, I just did that, exported the file as rtf to Mellel and got exactly the margins I have set up in Scrivener.

In the export pane try to move the margins that way then print preview and tell me if it looks lined up. For me it isn’t, with the margin on the left ending up much larger.