Finding by Format

In addition to searching for text, you can search by format. If you’ve been highlighting certain parts of your manuscript in different colors — say, blue for emotion and yellow for setting and description — and now you want to find all the blue-highlighted text, Find by Formatting is the answer.

In addition to highlighted text, you can also search for comments and footnotes, inline annotations, inline footnotes, revision color, colored text, links, text with preserved style, and character format.

Follow these steps to search by format:

1. Choose Edit⇒Find⇒Find by Formatting.

The Formatting Finder window appears, as shown in Figure 17-8.

2. Click the Find drop-down list, and then select an option from the types of formatting available to search.

When you change the formatting type, the options at the bottom of the window change.

3. To limit your search to specific text, enter the text in the Containing Text text box.

If you leave the text box blank, Scrivener finds all instances of the specified formatting.

4. Click the Search In drop-down list, and then choose to search all documents in the project or only those selected in the Binder.

5. Specify the special options that appear below the Search In drop-down list, if applicable.

Several formats have extra options:

• Highlighted Text: Offers a Limit Search to Color check box. Selecting this option limits the search to the color you choose. (To choose the color, click the Color box and select a color from the Colors window that appears.) If not selected, the search finds all highlighted text of any color.

• Comments & Footnotes: The Type drop-down list lets you choose to search for linked Footnotes, Comments, or both.

• Inline Annotations: The drop-down list provides options for searching by color. Any Color finds all inline annotations, regardless of color. Limit Search to Color lets you choose the desired color to find from the Color box. Exclude from Search leaves out the selected color when matching results.

• Revision Color: The drop-down list lets you specify the revision color to search for.

• Colored Text: Offers a Limit Search to Color check box. Selecting this option limits the search to the color you choose from the Color box. If it’s not selected, the search finds all text of any color.

If you search for colored text — not limited to a specific color — and get a match that appears to be normal text, it may be colored black. Text that has black applied is different from regular text (which has no color formatting applied, even though it appears black). To remove the color, right-click the selected text and choose Text Color⇒Remove Color from the contextual menu that appears.

• Links: Provides options to search for All links, Web/File (external) links, or Scrivener (internal) links (which are links embedded in the text, not references; I cover references in Chapter 5).

• Character Format: Lets you search by text format, including Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, and Keep with Next (which ensures that a paragraph is kept on the same page as the one that follows it).

6. Click Next to find the first match.

You can continue to click Next until you’ve cycled through all matches or found the one you were looking for.

7. Close the Formatting Finder window by clicking the red X button.