I’m in the process of preparing my manuscript for e-book formatting. I’d like to wrap all of my italics in tags to streamline the process before importing it into TextMate. Is there a way to do a search and find for italics within Scrivener so I can wrap the html tags around all italics without having to do it manually? Thanks in advance!
Is there a reason you are trying to do this manually via Textmate, rather than using Scrivener’s compiler to do this for you? Changing text in the editor without using compile is not an efficient way to do this…
Scrivener’s compiler converts rich text like italics automatically for EPub/Kindle output, and you can ask Scrivener to also export source files (HTML and CSS) during compile if you want to tweak it before making the epub etc.
If you’re output intent is plain text, and you are using the Plain Text (.txt) compile file type, then edit your Format and go into the Markup pane. In the middle of that, you’ll find an option to insert a prefix and suffix around all unstyled italic ranges.
For future reference, you’ll have better flexibility going forward by making use of styles, if it is your intention to use visual formatting in the editor to generate syntax on output. Styles can all have their own prefix and suffix.
That all aside, I agree with nontroppo, unless you have a very specific workflow that is already established, the ePub 3 output from Scrivener is a very clean place to start from in terms of building an eBook. Many are content with the compiler’s capabilities alone in fact, but even for those that prefer the designer approach, the HTML is Markdown clean and the CSS is all hand-crafted (and assembled algorithmically as needed) rather than serialised, like many word processor outputs would be.