Hi everyone! I apologize if this question has been asked before. To be honest, there’s so many ways to phrase the question that I have no idea if I can’t find an answer because I’m asking it wrong, or what.
Essentially: there’s a conversation happening in the file I’m working on between two people. I am currently trying to change one persons name to the color blue and the other persons name to the color green so as to better distinguish which lines belong to who.
I know I can use “find” for this, but going one by one would take ages. So I’m trying to find a way to search for the name so it shows me all of them in the document, so I can change the color all at once.
Project search and person’s name. You could make a character style with a different text color for several characters and then when find name in text apply to their conversations. You could also use keywords for each character and apply to scenes as well so can find every scene a character is in using keywords, and can search for every scene that has both character a and character b as well.
There isn’t a “Find All” type button in Scrivener, unfortunately. It even does have the ability to select multiple pieces of text at once, and there are tools that take advantage of that in the Edit ▸ Select submenu, but not off of text searches.
That said you can manually select multiple bits of text at once and format them all at once instead of over and over. The trick is to hold down the Ctrl key (same as you would to select multiple binder items) and double-click on the words you want to add to the selection. Once you have a good number selected, single-click the text colour tool in the format bar with the left mouse button to apply the currently used colour (right-click to change the active colour).
I do also agree that using styles might be better than raw colours too, but it depends. Using styles adds a little more complexity in that you don’t want them to do too much when compiling, making these words look different than the words around them, whereas text colour has a toggle in the compile Options tab that will strip them all out conveniently.
The advantage to using a few styles, one per name, is that you can use the Highlight feature instead of text colour, and highlights can be temporarily hidden via the View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Hide Markup menu toggle.
If you made the style for character thoughts a character style with highlighting of the text and different colors for different characters, wouldn’t you be able to check the box in compile settings to remove highlights at the time of compile and not have to manually change anything or am I wrong?
Style highlighting, the feature enabled in the style setup tool, never compiles, which is why I would go that route myself. The ability to hide them when you don’t need them is an extra bonus for purposes like this.
I was merely pointing out that by its nature, the styles feature is designed as a tool for enforcing editor formatting through the compiler’s own tools for extensively modifying the formatting of the text. If all you are looking for is an editorial tool, rather that a formatting tool, it is a complexity to be aware of.
Thank you both so much for your help, sorry that I didn’t answer before. I was looking up tutorials online to see if I can do the things you both have suggested since I don’t know how to do any of those things yet, haha.
But I’m trying them one by one to see which one might be best in the long run.
Also would absolutely love if this were a feature that could be added in the future somehow (the way I first described it). Would make my life so much easier with these files I’m working with
