Please refer to the above discussion for how to create your own word highlighter.
Thanks for spelling it out in such detail upstream, @AmberV. Instructive as always!
Hi, is this because Keyboard Maestro integrates into Scrivener?
I’ve got a whole list of writers tics and common mistakes that I’d like to be more aware of. e.g. I often use the wrong who’s/whose, use too many ?!'s and so on. To detect these I try to keep a list of them and occasionally do a project-wide search for each one, and then a document search for each document that comes up. This is extremely laborious though, and any time I start it I can pretty much write off the session as actual writing.
Meanwhile, I love the Linguistic Focus feature. It’s all there at a glance. Wouldn’t it be great if Linguistic Focus could find all my personal tics? Even if there was no actual UI and I had to maintain lists of regexes in config files somewhere, it would be an immense help and very much in keeping with what the name Linguistic Focus suggests it will do.
I notice the feature has one customisation option, and that is for Spanish dialogue, i.e. starting a line with a dash or enclosing it in angle brackets. I also noticed while searching, that another user wanted to focus the first sentence in every paragraph. Just recently I wanted to highlight all italic text. Some writers might benefit from highlighting all said-bookisms. Rather than adding piecemeal customisations like this please consider empowering us to add and share our own.
Thanks for reading.
I’d like this too. Something that allows you to tag or capture crutch/filler/tics words & phrases, then highlight when drafting.
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I’ve merged your post with ideas on this kind of capability into the existing discussion. Please refer to this how-to post, which contains our process for setting up your project to flag words.
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Oh boy, I never thought to click the little magnifying glass to find a load of options in there. There’s a whole lot of useful things, thank you. I can’t quite make it as easy on the eye as Linguistic Focus but this does most of what I’m interested in.
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There are customisation options for how the search highlight looks, in the Appearance: Textual Marks: Colors tab. If you want something a little more low-key, you could diminish the highlight background for example, and keep the underscore bright. Note that there is an opacity slider (on Mac anyway), that can come in handy here for stuff like that.
It’s an interesting idea though to maybe combine the aesthetic we took for the linguistic markup tool, and apply it to search results in some way. I don’t think that’s ever come up before, nor have I seen that done in search tools in general. It could be useful in some cases like this.
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Would be fantastic if you could
Yes, thank you Amber, the difference between Linguistic Focus and Project Search is that the former makes the focused text more legible than the surrounding text, whereas, no matter what colour you choose, Project Search highlighting makes it less legible - the stronger the highlight you choose, the less legible the highlighted text becomes. That’s why I said it’s less easy on the eye and why, although your suggestion does pretty much everything I hoped for, I’m still a bit disappointed this is the solution. Take that as appreciation for the look of Linguistic Focus rather than criticism of the Project Search.
I agree, there is such a thing as the ‘voice’ of the author. That said, beware of it intruding into other areas such as other distinct characters.
Linguistic Focus? Sounds like a Mac feature, not Windows.
On Windows, the visual effect they are describing can be seen with Edit ▸ Writing Tools ▸ Dialogue Focus.... The idea thus being that search results could be optionally presented in this fashion, fading out text that doesn’t match, rather than using a colour highlighter only on the text that does match.
I’m having trouble finding filter words as I edit. I would LOVE to search for words and replace them with a highlighted version. For example, search and replace (whole project) “saw” with the same word, but highlighted with a yellow background. Then, as I work through the version, I either rewrite/remove the filter word, or turn off highlighting if it should remain. I know there are work-arounds using the project replace and using characters (replace “saw” with “<<>>”) but I think highlighting is more elegant, and jumps out better.
I’ve merged your question into the existing discussion on how to do this. Please refer to this how-to post, which contains our process for setting up your project to flag words dynamically. There is a fair bit of discussion below that point as well, that might be illuminating, if you have any questions.
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