Hi guys,
I need to change all the underlined words in a ms to italicized words, and it would be insanely tedious to try and get them all by hand. Is there a way to do this in the project replace box?
Thanks!
Would it perhaps be better to hold off on this kind of for-purpose formatting change, and save it for when you compile? That’s one of the big advantages of Scrivener, you don’t have to format according to spec, and can let the compiler handle all the dirty work. In the Text Options tab, you can just select the “Convert italics to underlines” option and the manuscript will be fixed in one shot, without disrupting your writing preference.
If you really need to do this in the project text though, that would require a lot of manual labour. There is no search and replace for formatting, and there won’t be anything like that in 2.0 either. However you will be able to search for a type of formatting (like italics) and would be able to pretty easily step through the whole project this way—but I’d really recommend letting Scrivener do this work for you in compile if you can. 
Actually, if you’re trying to go underline to italics, I’m not sure there’s a way to do this (the compile will go the other direction, since typically for manuscript submission one wants underlines rather than italics), though I could be wrong. (And woe, my computer is sitting in a tub with rice at the moment, drying out and trying to live again after a Spilled Water incident, so I can’t go double check in Scrivener. Why, why, why doesn’t the rest of my household use Macs?) But this sort of format conversion is something some word processors can do (Nisus Writer Pro comes to mind, but I believe others can do it as well; at minimum, they could probably search for the formatting and speed up your manual replacement). So if it’s something you need for your final project rather than while you’re still working on it in Scrivener, you could perhaps hold off until you compile it and bring it into the word processor and then do the replacement there.
You’re right, I read that backwards! Mental flip since people usually want things to go the other way for submissions. Yes, in 1.54 there is only a compile transform for italics->underline. There will be an underline->italics compile-time transform in 2.0, so you could solve this particular problem in that fashion with the eminent upgrade.
The word processor method, if you have one capable of doing bulk formatting conversions like this, will help you out if you are at an early phase in your project. If you’ve already split things up a lot and done a fair amount of meta-data work in getting things organised, you’ll need to do a lot of copy and paste. Otherwise, if you are still in the early phases you could just re-import and split after fixing the document in a word processor.
Thanks for the responses, guys. Yeah, I’ve been underlining things since that was the way I learned to do it, but I keep seeing that agents want italics now instead. Oy!
Well hopefully that new compiler option coming in 2.0 will sort things out for you then, as you can phase into using italics and let the compiler fix up the stragglers—or even just continue to work as you prefer and producing submissions one way or the other depending on the requirements.
I think you meant “immanent.” It is quite possible the upgrade will be eminent, however…
Or perhaps “imminent”?
Mark
You don’t think Scrivener permanently pervades and sustains the Mac writing world?
Bah! All these homonyms. All I meant was “well known” and I think I got the right one.
All three of those. Do we not all enjoy playing with words and exploring …
Mark
Vic-k makes up his own. 
Fluff
“The imminent, eminent, immanent Scrivener 2”
Could have been penned by W.S. Gilbert himself!
Mark
His own explorerings or his own wordplays? 
Scrivener’s icon does seem to be a clue that must be so.
Actually, of course, W.S. Gilbert would have written:
“The imminent, eminent,
Totally immanent
Scrivener 2 for Mac.”
Mark
Not really anything as demanding. He just makes up his own words and rules.
Fluff