I’m having a few problems with the search function.
First, when the search paramenter is set to “All”, it will yield documents that contain a certain word not in the text itself, but in its notes/comments/descriptions. I believe this is the intended result (although I don’t remember this being true for Scrivener 1), but the problem is, the word is not highlighted if it’s contained within a note/comment/description. For documents with many notes, for instance, I have to browse and read everything until I find the word I’m looking for.
Second, and more importantly, I’m under the impression that the software is unable to highlight any search results containing an apostrophe: “Peter’s friends”, or “Beggar’s Bluff”, or anything of the sort. The documents containing the term do appear, but the term isn’t highlighted, and so once again I must browse through long documents to find it.
Finally, and that’s just a small detail, the first document that any search yields doesn’t highlight the searched term, unless I click on another document, then click back on the first. Then the highlight appears.
I apologize if any of this is confusing, and I can clarify with images or further explanations if necessary.
Yes, searching for “All” has always meant precisely that. If you only want to search within the Text, there is an option for that toward the top. Note that Scrivener doesn’t distinguish between “comments”, “footnotes” and “text”. They are all considered the same thing, even though the GUI separates them. The highlight function is only performed in the main editor area though.
This is an unfortunately missing implementation that is already recorded. When using Ctrl+F to find text (which Project Search automatically sets up for you), the F3 and Shift+F3 shortcuts for walking through search hits should be scrolling to comments & footnotes that contain matching terms, and placing the cursor within them. If the inspector tab is closed though, nothing is meant to happen.
It sounds like you may not be using previous mechanism for finding hits, which should be easier than manually scrolling. That’s not to say that search terms shouldn’t be highlighting, that’s a bug obviously, but you will find them even though they aren’t passively highlighted, using the previously mentioned shortcuts. You can also open the find panel and use the buttons, if you prefer.
I’m not seeing that one myself. There is a short delay though, maybe that is longer in large projects?
Thank you for your reply! I think the main issue here really is the search for terms with an apostrophe, which aren’t highlighted. It can be hard to find them even with the shortcut. Do you think I should create a separate post for that, or report it somewhere else?
Thanks, Jestar, it looks like that one refers specifically to how searching for ’ or " did not in the past yield results for phrases including: “ ” ‘ ’ instead. That part should be working now, but perhaps when that was changed, it broke the highlighting code. I’ve linked the tickets just in case. The highlighting issue is now marked LH4650. All of these given forms of embedded quote punctuation fail highlighting, though naturally it would be unusual to find anything other than ’ inside of a word.