Shannon Fallon

Today I’m going to talk about a little thing that annoyed me for a while when I was learning how to use Scrivener. I had trouble finding other help articles online for this, so here you go!

The problem, in short, comes when I copy text from Microsoft Word. No matter how little I copy, it seems to change the length of every line, such that it doesn’t match what I have in the rest of the document.

The first paragraph here was copied in from Word, while the second was written in Scrivener. The difference is obvious, but how do you fix it?

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do. In Scrivener 1 for Windows, you just have to go up to the top menu and click Format, then Ruler. There’s also a keyboard shortcut (Control + Shift + R). Either of these methods will give you a ruler to play with.

In Scrivener 3 for Windows, you should have a ruler already, but if it’s disappeared, try going to View, Customize Toolbars, select Format Toolbar, and then select Ruler. Then, click the left facing arrow to add it to your toolbar. Now, you can simply click the ruler to turn it off and on as needed.

Either way, you should end up with a ruler similar to the one shown here.

Now you can see that the length of the line is being controlled by the little arrow that shows up right where all the line breaks are. To fix it, all you have to do is highlight the section, the click and drag the arrow to the place where you want the line to break. Problem solved!

As a bonus, this is also how you can add or remove an indent at the start of each paragraph (using the downward facing arrow at the start of the ruler) or indent each line after the first (using the upward facing arrow at the start of the ruler). Behold your options!

I hope this helps you get the formatting you’re looking for! It definitely saves me from quite a bit of annoyance.