Quote:
Originally Posted by BeccaPrice
Scrivener, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't use styles, and it drives me buggy.
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Ouch, yes. I remember being so impressed with everything else about the product. There were two things that concerned me - styles was one, but I wondered whether I just needed to spend more time to hunt them down - and the other was some effective way of handling story threads and time-lines.
Not that OO/LO helps with the latter, it's still a manual thing for me at the moment, but without that incentive to move it was easier to stay with LO. I even went so far as to spend some days experimenting with creating my own program to do it - using LO as the text editor, and using master document and section features to fit the collection of scenes together (in much the same way that I do manually right now at the chapter level). I quickly worked out two things: it is definitely feasible (OO/LO and MSO all have the API needed to do it), but it was going to take more time than I could spare to get anything useful. (I could either write the software or write my books, the books won.)
Hmm... getting a bit off topic.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
As for styles.
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A quick addition to what I said above. If you really want to learn styles there is a slightly drastic way to do it: Hide the formatting toolbar! (the one showing the Italic and Bold buttons etc). If you use Ctrl+I for italics etc. (as I imagine most writers do) then go into Tools / Customize. Select the Keyboard tab, scroll down to the Ctrl+ keys and clear the offending keys (maybe save the current before you start so you can easily restore them). Now show the "Styles and Formatting" dialog and attach it to your main window. This will go a long way toward forcing you to use styles throughout your documents.
(I have macros set up for Ctrl+E (emphasis) and a few other items, but describing those is beyond the scope of what I should say here.)