"Language focus-like" tip for Spanish (and other languages)

I usually write in Spanish, and I’ve noticed the Windows version of Scrivener lacks a few interesting features useful for dialogue handling available on the Mac.

For instance, Dialogue Focus currently only detects quoted dialog, like “Hello, good to see you”.

Double quoted dialog can be used in Spanish too, but mostly for short sentences within a narrative paragraph. The standard structure of a dialog in Spanish prefers an em-dash at the beginning of a line, and annotations go surrounded by em-dash too (they are called “raya” for this purpose).

So, I’ve been tinkering with some regex and got some results that may be of use to other languages as well.

  1. To highlight all dialogs, use ^—.*$

  2. To highlight all narrative, use ^(?!—).*$ (serendipity rules! :grin:)

You can create dynamic collections for each search, and in turn load your scrivenings session with all affected documents.

Hope this helps users of French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian and many other languages that follow similar conventions.

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