Hi Keith!
I would love to be able to input hidden character/invisibles codes (^p, ^l, ^t, etc.) into the search-and-replace window, so that I can “FIND: ^p” and “REPLACE: ^p^p” and so on.
I write in 1x or 1.5x line spacing (because I hate writing in 2x), but when it comes to exporting, I often need to convert to 2x spacing, but because it’s for blogger I have to trawl through every line adding that extra paragraph return (or move everything to [unmentionable software] and do it there). I’d love to be able to do this with scriv’s find and replace.
I think what you are wishing for would not solve your problem. If I understand, what you are wanting is a way to take wrap-around text and insert a hard carriage return at the end of every line. But wrap-around text does not have hidden line break characters at the end of every line and so there would be nothing for you to search-and-replace to do the job.
Something that will do that job is the (free) TextWrangler. It has a Hard Wrap command which does exactly what (I think) you want.
But, finally, I am not sure you should want what you want. If your aim here is to get double-spaced text on your blogger site, I would like to suggest that inserting hard carriage returns is not the way! You can control line spacing and much else by adjusting the stylesheet settings in your blogger site template. This would be a much nicer solution and would not require you to prep your text in the least.
But what I’m wanting is exactly as I described: I want to replace a single paragraph (hard) return with two paragraph returns, and make other similar changes to hidden characters (tabs, soft line returns, etc.) The reasons for doing this are many and varied (not just blogger-related) and much too boring to detail here!
Aha. All that talk of line spacing threw me off, I see.
I abundantly agree that search and replace for invisibles is a very good thing. I use such facilities constantly. Often this happens in [unmentionable] app. I also have some custom Applescripts on my script menu that serve me for working with text in Scrivener.
Wow, I love that list of services! I’m not such a programmer as I was in my nerdy student days, and I’ve never even got as far as working out how apple scripts work [ahem], so I’d still like invisibles-search-and-replace facility within Scriv., but there looks like a good pile of stuff to explore there. Thanks!