Scrivener offers excellent features to replace or exchange text, not only for a single document, but for the entire project. In particular, the ability to search for and replace an expression in the entire project has often been very helpful to me.
I wonder if it would be possible to extend the function so that not only text content could be edited, but also formats could be replaced, for example, a project-wide search for “text” to replace the expression with “text” or “text”.
It would be even more ingenious if users could link a search term project-wide to a document.
You can do this with Markdown formatting, but not with rich text. (If you’re not familiar with it, Markdown uses human readable markup, which the search engine sees as plain text.)
I’m not sure I understand your second question?
Katherine
Hello Katherine,
Thanks for the tip.
About my second question …
In Scrivener, links can be set to documents. I like to set such references in the text for certain expressions, for example the name of a protagonist, which is linked to the character sheet. A networked glossary can be built up this way, but you have to set the links laboriously by hand. What if you could select a term, for example the name of a protagonist, and it would then be searched for project-wide and automatically linked to the character sheet from any document?
Greetings,
Thomas
Have you tried Wiki-style links? See Section 10.1 in the manual.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, as you can’t easily apply them to existing text, but pretty close.
Katherine
Oh, I hadn’t seen that yet. Thank you for pointing it out. I’ll have a look at it right away. Have a pleasant evening and thank you for the quick reply.
I have been playing with the use of double brackets to create an automatic document link. I wondered about mass changing existing words into document links by using the find and replace function. So, in the find and replace interface, I could find “Name” and ask it to replace it with “[[Name]]” and have it create the links and the backlinks automatically. Except it just replaces things to “[[Name]]”, with no links. I’m guessing it doesn’t work that way? Or is there something I could do to get it to work?
I’m just playing around, trying to figure out what system will work best for me. I was thinking that would be useful.
Thank you for any ideas.
I’m guessing a similar effect could be made by searching for the “Name” and then adding the desired linked-to document into the document bookmarks. The text wouldn’t have the link itself, but it would be in the bookmark window? If the sections of text were small enough, it would be specific enough. Hmmm.
Edit: Except I can’t figure out how to add internal bookmarks to multiple documents at once. It seems to work with keywords. I think what I’m trying to do is some weird mix of the functionality of keywords and internal bookmarks. Maybe I’m dreaming of having a keywords folder in the binder with the same functionality as the dedicated bookmarks folder, where a file is automatically created for each new keyword added. And that file links to a list of all files that have that have that particular keyword.
Ugh, sorry for being all questioning about everything. I feel like I’m so close to an efficient system to adapt for this story that already has 300k words without having to go back and do it all by hand. I’m guessing it will be a mix of keywords and bookmarks and searches. Search collections could potentially be useful, but they can’t be nested, as far as I can tell.
(I’m having way too much fun trying to figure out everything scrivener can do. Thank you for that!)