Changing styles

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

My apologies if this topic has already been raised and answered. If so, I’d appreciate a short pointer toward the relevant thread…

My question regards making document-wide changes to styles. I know that ‘styles’ in Scrivener are really pre-formats but I’m interested to if there is some way of using ‘find and replace’ to make global changes to formats. This might act as a surrogate for at least one of the mechanisms that make style-sheets so useful.

There’s no ‘format’ criteria available in the regular Find… dialogue box and there’s no ‘replace’ function available in the ‘Find by Formatting’ dialogue box. So I’m wondering if there’s another technique for doing this.

My (uneducated) wish would be for the latter; an addition to ‘Find by colour’ or ‘Find by character format’ that allows substituting (or replacing) a different value for the same attribute using a ‘replace all’ command.

That way I could change my hundreds of note identifiers from a bright-red 16pt Times New Roman to a more elegant 6pt superscript at one, or possibly two, fell swoops.

thanks for any suggestions.

2

Unfortunately Scrivener has no capacity for search and replace for formatting. This is something you’ll need to do in a word processor after compiling a final copy out. We do have plans for making this particular aspect easier to manage in the future.

3

A global style change would be a blessing. Even a script that searched for paragraph specs such as margins or text color and then selected the entire paragraph and re-formatted it would work. Clunky programming like old style macros, I admit, but still a workaround.

4

Well when I say things will be getting better, I mean more along the lines of those Formatting Presets being fleshed out and turned into stylesheets, similar to what you’d see in a more complex word processor—but with a few tricks up our sleeve that we think make it even better (of course! :wink:). For something you describe here, it would be as simple as changing the “preset” and having that change made globally to the project to all text marked with that style in the past.