Problems again with a Scrivener search; this time it’s a Project Search (by which I mean a search within a project).
I have written a section of the book I’m working on with quotes from a book by a writer with a fairly abstruse name.
HoudahSpot returns three projects when I use it to search for this writer’s name. One of these three is the project within which I’m writing the book.
However, in the project itself, neither a search for the whole name nor a search for parts of it, whether upper-and-lower-case or all lower-case, finds any use of the name.
I’m 99% sure I wrote this section in this project. Is there any way to find it? I’ve tried clearing-and-resetting with no luck.
Ah, found out what the problem was - or part of it, anyway. Scrivener doesn’t include accented versions of letters in its search: if you search for Sile and the name is Síle, it won’t find it. But also it wasn’t finding a book title, so maybe that’s not all… I’ve found the reference at least.
Sile and Síle are different words, so failing to find one in a search for the other is expected behavior.
If the book title was capitalized and the search term was not, that might have been the problem. The search options – dropdown menu from the search box – let you decide whether a search should be case sensitive or not.
Yeah. Web search is a different goal: you’re looking for things about a given topic, so you want the search to be “fuzzy” enough to catch variant spellings, missing accents, and so on.
Scrivener’s search, in contrast, has to be be more precise. If you spell a word incorrectly three times, for instance, you probably don’t want to be shown the dozens or hundreds of instances where you spelled it correctly.