In the middle of editing a text (called Chapter 1) I lost the ability to Find & Replace any words with apostrphes in them within that document. It had been working: I’d searched for “it’s” and found them. Now it won’t find them or any other word with the mark. It’ll find other words just fine. And project search will allow me to find other texts within the project that had words with apostrophes; but not in Chapter 1.
I’ve closed the project, I’ve closed the program. Same results. This is the part where I say: HELP!
It sounds like you are running into an issue with typographic apostrophes. Check out this FAQ entry and see if that does the trick for you. If that solves it, I am not sure why this has only now become a problem, but the next version of Scrivener will handle this issue in a more intelligent fashion.
Okay, so that enabled me to find apostrophes again. Thanks for your help.
I’m still confused by the fact that the search works inconsistently. I just tested a project search with “it’s” and half of the documents in the project come up, just not the one I was working on. A font issue, perhaps?
There are a lot of things that could have happened. It could be that you turned on (or off) smart quotes at some point (it’s a preference in the Typography section). Perhaps you imported material from another word processor and so the quotation system is different.
Personally, that’s why I just leave it off in everything I use, since not everything deals with it. I do a lot of writing in TextMate, just short pieces that don’t need any organisation, for instance. So I’d rather just leave them all straight quotes and let a script handle the conversion later when I need a final format.
Depending on how you work though, it can be a useful feature.
Yes, it sounds as though some of your words have smart apostrophes in and others don’t. The search is currently very literal - if you enter a straight apostrophe into the search field, it won’t find smart (curly) ones. 2.0’s search is fuzzier so this shouldn’t be an issue - it will find words with both types of apostrophe/speechmarks in. For now, though, the only workaround is to run two searches/find & replaces, one with the straight apostrophe and one with the curly one.