Normal/italic - is it possible to invert the selection?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Pretty straightforward I think; I may well be missing something obvious. If I have a block of text which contains some italics, e.g.:

This guy really knows what he’s doing!

…and I want to change the whole thing to italics, but keep the emphasis, like this:

This guy really knows what he’s doing!

At the moment, I start by underlining the italics, so I know where they are:

This guy really knows what he’s doing!

Then convert the whole thing to italics:

This guy really knows what he’s doing!

THEN convert the underlined word(s) to normal, and remove the underlining:

This guy really knows what he’s doing!

I have over 13,000 words to convert, and I use a lot of italics. There must be an easier method!

2

Hmm, I can’t think of a good way of doing that. The compiler can do batch conversion from italics to underscore and vice versa, but that would only help you out with half of the job since it can’t convert underscored text to normal text. You can search by formatting in the Edit/Find/Find by Formatting... tool, but that’s a one-by-one step tool that would only save you a fractional amount of time.

Really this sounds like a job for OpenOffice, Word, or any other word processor that can do Search and replace for formatting via codes. Then you could do something similar to what you are doing by hand with a few successive searches.

3

Thanks! I’ve found a slightly quicker method; starting with, say:

This guy really knows what he’s doing! I love his style!

Then use format - convert - bold and italics to multimarkdown syntax, giving this:

This guy really knows what he’s doing! I love his style!

Huh - it looks like a tweet. Asterisks for emphasis. Now italicise the lot:

This guy really knows what he’s doing! I love his style!

Remove the italics from the words between the asterisks:

This guy *really* knows what he’s doing! I *love* his style!

Then find and replace “*” with an empty “replace” box:

This guy really knows what he’s doing! I love his style!

As I said, slightly quicker.