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.