Hey everyone!
I noticed very far along in a project that Scrivener had been making all the single letters “i” capital, to I. This is not correct in my language (Swedish). Is there any way to change this back at the same time in an easy way?
To clarify, I want to change every SINGLE letter “I” to “i” instead, in an entire project. (while not at the same time making i:s in the begininning of a word in the beginning of a sentence capital). Is this possible?
Use project replace from I to i, with whole word selected and “ignore case” turned off.
You can also add a space after both the I you want to change and the i you change to.
Firstly, go into the Corrections preference pane and disable the Capitalize ‘i’ setting, to avoid this happening any further.
I think the safest way to do this would be to use regular expressions (switched from “Contains”), so you can weed out cases where the ‘I’ follows a terminal punctuation mark. Regular expressions are an advanced wildcard system that make it possible to create very specific searches. Here is what you would search for:
(?<![.?!] )\bI\b
And replace with i of course.
This will passively check for the two characters that fall before the capital ‘I’ and ensure that they are not a period or question mark followed by a space (if you habitually double-space after a sentence, then add another space before the closing parenthesis—if you are not consistent on this matter, let me know, I can give you a more complicated search pattern). The \b markers are “word boundaries”, or a way of detecting the edge of the word, which includes spaces as well as punctuation, thus only isolated uppercase 'I’s will be detected and no other characters around the ‘I’ involved in the pattern will be included in the replacement. They are all passive.
You may need to tweak the punctuation set within the square brackets. Basically everything in between [ and ] is saying “one of these” characters needs to exist in this position.
And as always, when doing stuff like this, I like to test the setup first with regular Document Find, just pounding on the Next button in a few different documents, and making sure you aren’t getting false positives. After doing that, use File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To... and save a backup somewhere handy with a name like “Before i Fix”. And then and only then use the Edit ▸ Find ▸ Project Replace... command.
Hi,
I get how to do this in a chapter (by inputting cmd+f and then search and replace.) But how do I do this for an entire project at once? I can’t seem to find the “project replace” option.
[Edit > Find > Project Replace…]
Thank you so much! Problem resolved!