Sorry if this one’s been mentioned already (said I was new here today…!).
I’ve begun trying to use Scrivener for practical purposes. Importing an RTF version of my previous draft didn’t work, but I copied and pasted (is that a bug? I was using the drag-and-drop-from-Explorer-into-binder method on Windows 7 64bit…).
That done, I intended to start using the Split at Selection tool to start chopping and changing bits around. To do this, I wanted to use the Ctrl-F find tool to quickly locate the places where I wanted my splits to be made.
The first of these meant find the phrase, “author’s note”. Typing this into the Find search box got no result, but the moment I removed the word “author’s” the document instantly jumped to the first occurrence of the word “note”.
I’d expected (or hoped!) to be able to put in more than one word for the Find function, as you can with most word processors. Can this be done?
I’m a little confused, you tried to search for a phrase and it wouldn’t find it? Because I used it to look up “North Fork” (the name of a town in my story) and it was able to find it just fine. Bear in mind that it has to be typed in the same as it is in the work. So if there are two spaces between it and you only put one in the find box it might not find it.
This might also have something to do with you not running the newest Beta. I just responded to your other thread as well.
As I said before, I am running Beta 1.3. But, after reading your post, I tried again, and have identified the culprit: the apostrophe.
A phrase works fine for me, too. The problem was “author’s note” used an apostrophe, and this seemed to be confusing the system.
If it helps, I was searching an imported RTF, converted from a .docx by Microsoft Office 2007.
This must be connected to the fact that it is an imported file. Imports must do something strange with the apostrophe. It allows me to search for terms with an apostrophe in a document that was CREATED in Scrivener. But if it’s imported it doesn’t find the word with the apostrophe. No idea what might cause that.
Maybe it has something to do with what Microsoft Word does with apostrophes? If you type in an apostrophe immediately after a word, Word converts the image of the apostrophe so that the tail faces the word (pointing to the left). Likewise, if you use apostrophes to show dialogue, putting one immediately before the first word of your dialogue will replace it with an image with the tail pointing to the right.
I’ve noticed this problem when copying Word text into webpage creation programmes before - I had to go and replace all the apostrophes with standard ’ images, because otherwise they displayed as blocks on browsers.
However, if you paste Word files into a text editor, it always replaces the altered apostrophe with a standard apostrophe. Can Scrivener behave in the same way? It would save a lot of confusion…!