Hi there,
In Scrivener 2, I used to underline all my sections that I would want to later compile with Italics. There doesn’t seem to be a transform underline option available anymore which is fine. However, how do I quickly go through older manuscripts that have been brought into Scrivener 3 and tell the application that these underlined sections should be transformed to Italics?
Any advice appreciated.
Kind Regards
In Compile, right click a format name and choose Edit Format > Transformations > Convert Underlines to Italics
Someone else might have a better idea…
That’s great, Bridey. Thanks!
Um, I actually can’t see that option under Edit Format. I’m using the ePub3 format.
Bridey’s method will work on compile (and it’s what I’d do), but if you want to change the actual content in the editor (not just in compilation) you could try this:
Create a single Scrivening for the relevant documents.
Go to the first piece of underlined text and select it.
Open the Styles panel (Ctl-s)
Click the gear button and choose Select Similar Formatting. This should select everywhere in the scrivening with underlined text (so you’ll see ‘islands’ of selected text, all underlined.)
Cmd-i then cmd-u (or vice versa…)
Notes: this will only pick up underlining in paragraphs with the same format as the one you selected manually. E.g. if most of your underlines are in normal paragraphs, but there are a few in block quotes, then the ones in block quotes won’t be picked up on the first run. So all you do is repeat the steps, but manually selecting the first underline in a block quote this: repeat and rinse with other underlining as necessary. It should only take two or three passes and then you’re probably better off using Edit > Find > Find by Formatting to pick up the rest sequentially.
HTH – test it first!
The Scrivener Formats in compile are sacrosanct and immutable. They can’t be edited, although they can be (by right clicking the compile name) duplicated and edited to create custom formats.
However, it seems as though ePub 2 allows transformations, but ePub 3 doesn’t.
Sorry that I don’t have a simple solution to offer.
That’s great. Thanks again everyone who chimed in on this. Much appreciated.
Pleasure. If you find a sweeter solution, please do share. Keen to learn.
Actually, italicised text should be retained in ePub 3 export - I just tried it and it worked fine. What is not retained is underlined text, and currently there is no way of setting it so that underlined text can be converted to italics. (This is a bit of an oversight and I’ll look into that.) The problem is that in order to support the HTML5 required for ePub 3, I have had to write a rich text > MultiMarkdown > HTML converter. There’s really only one type of emphasis supported by MultiMarkdown, so underlines get lost. I’ve put this on my list to look at though, as I say.
All the best,
Keith
I must have been doing something wrong or had created a dodgy project/setting.
I have just created a new project and, of course, you are right: regular italicised text will compile in ePub 3.
I’ll edit the post above so as not to mislead anyone who reads this thread.
Apologies to all.
Keith, I noticed you fixed this in 3.0.1 - I just wanted to thank you. It’s saved me a lot of trouble with older texts that had underlined words but needed to be sent to ePub 3.
Best Wishes.
