For many years, I have entered italics like this. I have reasons for doing this, and I would like to keep hard-coding italics into my files.
With version 3 the underscores don’t work anymore. They should be asterisks. Cool beanz. I have no issue with that.
But when I select convert multimarkdown in the compile menu, my paragraphs vanish.
All I want in any of my documents is for this or this to become this
Multimarkdown is way overkill for what I’m doing.
I want my paragraphs back.
I don’t think I can search for a wildcard and replace the text between underscores or asterisks with text in italics. I can use multimarkdown option in compiling but need to solve the paragraphing issue. Apparently I need to enter two line returns. After scouring the forum, online and the manual for a few hours, I have zero clue how to do this. I need to enter a RegEx expression? Which one? Where? What syntax. I’m thoroughly unfamiliar with all of this. I only want my paragraphs back cries in frustration
Why can’t you do a Search (on _) and Replace (with *)?
Or, better, how about leaving the ‘_’ characters like you like them and putting in a Replacement specification in the right-side pane of Compile — which will swap asterisks in at compile time.
A common way to “escape” a character that would otherwise have a special meaning (like wildcard) is to put a backslash character before it — as in ‘*’, which would specify a literal asterisk character.
I feel your pain. When I upgraded to Scriv 3, I decided to go though my active projects and convert all my asterisk-indicated italics to an italic style for exactly this reason—I decided not to fight the new system. I allowed myself a week to transition to the new version, and that consumed a day of it.
But if you want to continue using your asterisks, there’s only one way—leaving a blank line between each of your paragraphs. It’s not hard to learn the habit, just press return twice instead of once between paragraphs. It’ll soon look natural. While you’re getting used to it, turning View->Text Editing->Show Invisibles on may be helpful.
As for changing your previous work, that’s easy, too, and doesn’t involve regular expressions. Just put together a massive Scrivenings view of the texts that don’t compile to paragraphs as you’d like. Then open the Find and Replace dialog (Edit->Find->Find…). In the Find section type option-return. In the Replace section, type option-return twice. Make sure the scope is “entire document”. Then click the “replace all” button to let 'er rip. As long as you always compile with the “Convert Multimarkdown to rich text” option on, your text will now compile as you want.
The problem is, I cannot find, for the life of me, how or where to enter a return character. Anything I try simply doesn’t have that option. I’m probably missing something.
Hold down the option (alt) key on the keyboard, and while holding it, press and release the return key. This is the standard MacOS way to enter a return character into a dialog field, and as such is covered in the MacOS documentation.
You can also copy and paste white space characters (Return, Tab, etc.) into dialog boxes. The View -> Text Editing -> Show Invisibles command facilitates that by making them visible.
It’s buried somewhere in the MacOS doc, but for years I did it the way Katherine said, showing Invisibles so I could SEE the darn things and then copying and pasting them into dialog fields.
To help you recognize this sort of info in the future, the customary way to write simultaneous key combinations like that is by hyphenating the the key names: command-v is the key combination for Paste, etc. So option-return ( opt-return, alt-enter, & so forth) is how this key combo would be written in doc or by posters like myself who can’t figure out how to type the fancy mod key symbols . I ran across a casual reference to opt-return in some post that was about something else, and that’s how I learned it. I passed the info on to you. I’m sorry if I implied in any way that you were "supposed " to know this; merely that as a MacOS standard key combo it wouldn’t be in the Scriv doc.
Just put together a massive Scrivenings view of the texts that don’t compile to paragraphs as you’d like. Then open the Find and Replace dialog (
. I ran across a casual reference to opt-return in some post that was about something else, and that’s how I learned it. I passed the info on to you. I’m sorry if I implied in any way that you were "supposed " to know this; merely that as a MacOS standard key combo it wouldn’t be in the Scriv doc.