Posted 18 August 2010 at 09:27 | Permalink
Hi J.C.,
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You can already name highlights using the Highlight Finder. You can use arbitrary colours and have them available in the highlight menu in 2.0 though, yes.
You can already search highlighted text using the Highlight Finder. (This has been overhauled and integrated with other formatting finders in 2.0).
[…]
Best,
Keith
Nice ! I didn’t see that.
But, what I would say is :
The possibility to ad as many colors I want (if I understand, it will be ok in the 2.0)
To have the result of the research in one new document. I’d like to read, for example, all the yellow highlighting text in one new document (called “yellow highlighting” for example). And in this new document, each extract would be preceded by the name of the document from witch it came (for example “scene 1”, “scene 4”…)
In this way, it would result like this :
1 - I highlight in yellow every dialog of Steve in the Scenes 1, 4 and 10.
2 - I search yellow in the highlight finder, in scene 1, 4 and 10 (text document 1, 4 and 10)
3 - I have all the dialogs of Steve in a new document.
Now, I can read all what Steve says (and only that) in all these scenes (1, 4 and 10).
Result : ------------------
Title of the text document : Yellow (results)
Scene 1 (text 1) :
blablabla… blablabla…
Scene 4 (text 4) :
Bla. And Bla, And bla…
Scene 10 (text 10) :
Bla bla bla, blablabla…
I try to be clear, but I’m french and it’s difficult, sorry.
Disclaimer: I am not a Literature and Latte employee, just a user. I’m sorry if this is hard to understand, I speak English and a little Spanish, not French.
You can pick more highlighter colors now, if you click and hold on that little arrow by the “Highlighter” button and select “Arbitrary…”. You can then save that color selection in Apple’s built-in little white boxes on the bottom part of the color menu—just select the color and drag it to one white box and it saves your color setting to get it again in 1 click, later.
Have you checked out the keywords? The way you’re wanting to search for highlighter sounds like it could be more easily done with keywords. You could add a keyword to scene 1 saying “Dialogue: Steve”, then open the Keywords HUD while reading the rest of your project. So Steve spoke again in scenes 4 and 10? Drag that keyword from the HUD over to the keyword section of those Scrivenings. (I’ve included one example of how I’ve used keywords below.)
You can put all of Steve’s dialogues in a new document easily. First make a document for where you want the dialogue to go, and put that document where you want it in the Binder. Then select Steve’s dialogue in scene 1, right-click on it, and select “Append Selection to Document” and pick Steve’s dialogue document.
Note: You could also, if you wanted, use Annotations (Command-shift-A) to mark text. Like, when you have STEVE at the top of dialogue, put an annotation after it of “Steve Dialogue”, and then later, you can select everything, Edit Scrivenings, and Command-F (find) each “Steve Dialogue” throughout the draft.
Sorry for my convoluted English, but did that make sense?
Yes, in 2.0 the highlighter menu will pull from any custom colours you have set up on your system, letting you easily select them from the menu instead of having to go through Arbritrary Colour and then clicking on the custom colour chip in the wheel palette.
I agree with Carradee, I think you’ll be better off using Keywords for this. The Find by Formatting palette in 2.0 will be greatly improved, but it will remain a step-search tool, like the current Find Highlighting tool (though you’ll also be able to search for only highlights containing certain text). You have to click a button to advance to each highlight. There will be no way of collecting all similarly formatted texts into a Search Results list like Project Search does. Keywords do let you do this though, so they are a great way to keep track of stuff like this, and it works in 1.x as well.
Ok but the keywords are associated to a document, not to a part of text, no ?
In fact, I’m a sociologist. I write papers from interviews. I’d like to put each interview in a document and select all the extracts where people talk about a theme (health, education, family, etc.) in each interview.
After that, I would like to create one document for each theme, with all the extracts where all the people told me about one theme :
Find “Health” creates a 1st document :
Steve said that, and that, and that
Michael said that and that and that
Allison said that…
Find “Education” creates a 2nd document :
Mary said that…
Steve said that…
Find “Familly” creates a 3rd document : etc…
This would be very very useful for my work and I don’t find any nice application witch can do that (except big, expensive, and awful “professional” ones). It would be very useful for journalists too.
I’m going to read your answers again, perhaps I didn’t understand something.
