Please Help Me With Highlighting Challenge--

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

Hello all,

I am (of course) deep in the middle of a project and bumping into what seems to be a serious limitation in Scrivener. I make long rough documents in a project, then review them and highlight the parts of the document that will be useful to me. I had planned to search the rough document by highlight, and then copy and paste the highlighted text into various parts of my structure as document notes or synopses, or scenes, etc. Here’s what I discovered:

I can search the document by highlight, even by particular colors, but once I get to that text, I can’t really do anything to it using the keyboard. So suppose I get to the highlighted text and I want to Control+X to cut it, and paste it, or Control+C to copy and paste. No go. I can right click and copy or cut, but that means taking my hands off the keyboard and using the mouse, which really slows me down.

So then I thought, no problem. I’ll just export the file as a word document and search by highlighting there. It appears that although my highlighted text gets exported in the proper color (yellow or pink), word doesn’t understand the formatting as highlighting, so I can’t search for it at all. “Search for highlight” produces no results. (If I apply highlighting in word, I can find it, no problem.)

Further, I discover that although I can search a document for formatting, there is no way to globally search and replace formatting.

What I did for the moment is go through manually and change all of my highlighted text to inline annotations, which I can then export to a word file and cut and paste back into scrivener as I like. But it has left me with an uneasy feeling:

Is there really no way to do a search and replace on character formatting, changing highlighting to inline annotations, or Bold to Underline? Is it also true that if I copiously highlight a document, I won’t be able to search for those highlights if I export the document to word?

Am I missing some essential step? Could some Scrivener guru please give me a better understanding of this?

Thanks.

2

Scrivener doesn’t handle replacing formatting as you’re describing; you can use Find by Formatting to search step-wise through each instance of a certain formatting, but to do something like find all highlighted text and change it to italics, you’d need to use a tool like Word or OpenOffice.

You can do the other things in Scrivener, however. When using Find by Formatting, the Ctrl+Shift+F3 and Ctrl+Alt+F3 shortcuts will let you find Next or Previous with focus in the editor, so you can use keyboard shortcuts on the found selection.

For the highlights in Word, it looks like there’s a bug in 1.8.6’s compile Transformation options that’s reversing the option to “Use Microsoft Word highlighting”. Word handles its highlights differently from the standard RTF, so this compatibility option adjusts the way the highlights are encoded in the compiled document so that Word will recognize them. (Without this, Scrivener’s highlights come into word as a text background shading.) Normally you would want this to be checked, but it appears to be flipped internally right now, so make sure that is deselected before compiling. When you open the document in Word, you should find the highlight colours are adjusted slightly, matching Word’s highlight colour options, and Word will treat them like normal highlights.

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Thank you as always for the very quick reply. I wasn’t actually compiling my document in Word, just “exporting” it. Is there a way to check “use Word highlighting” in that case, or am I correct in assuming that I should just compile instead of exporting…?