Use Scrivener’s Find by Formatting Feature to Find Highlights, Comments, Colored Text, and More

As you progress in your Scrivener projects, you may want to find various words or texts in your files. While Scrivener’s find and replace feature is powerful, and its Project Search lets you find text throughout your projects – in text files, research, and more – the Find by Formatting feature goes one step further.

Instead of searching for specific words or text strings as with the other find features, Find by Formatting searches for text formatted in specific ways. If you want to search for bold text, revision marks, highlighted text, or text formatted with specific styles, Find by Formatting can do this. This is especially useful if you’ve put comments or highlights in texts to mark things to come back to when you revise your draft.

How to access Find by Formatting

There are three ways to access the Find by Formatting feature.
– From the Edit menu: choose Edit > Find > Find by Formatting.
– Use a keyboard shortcut: on Mac, press Comamnd-Option-Control-F; on Windows, press Alt+Shift+F.
– Click the downward-pointing chevron next to the magnifying glass in the toolbar and choose Find by Formatting.

The dialogue that displays defaults to finding highlighted text in all documents in your project with the default highlight color. The Containing Text field is empty; you don’t need to enter text here, since Scrivener searches formatting, though you can specify text with the selected formatting if you want.

The Search in field lets you choose between All Documents or Current Editor. The latter narrows down the search to currently visible text in the Editor and can be much faster than searching across a large project with a lot of research files.

Which types of formatting can you find this way?

You can use Find by Formatting to search for a variety of formatting types; click the Find menu in the Find by Formatting dialogue to choose from the following:

• Highlighted Text
• Comments & Footnotes
• Inline Annotations
• Inline Footnotes
• Revision Color
• Colored Text
• Style
• Character Format
• Links
• Images
• Tables
• Preserved Formatting Text (text marked with Format > Preserve Formatting, which you might want to use to override compile formatting)

Learn more about using comments, footnotes, and annotations; revision mode; styles and blank styles; and images in Scrivener.

Why use these types of formatting in Scrivener projects?

You use these formatting types in many different ways. Styles change the way your text displays while you are working. They can help structure your project with things like headers and separating sections within files. But in most cases, they will be overridden by section layouts when you compile your project.

Many writers use highlighting, comments, and annotations to mark things to come back to as they work. Rather than stopping to research while writing, it’s practical to mark bits of text you want to change or verify with one of these types of formatting. When editing your draft, you can resolve all of these before doing a full re-read of your work.

When Find by Formatting is useful

You probably won’t use Find by Formatting while you’re writing your first draft, though you may want to use it to find comments or annotations you’ve made as you progress to check things for consistency. (See Use Annotations, Comments, & Footnotes in Your Scrivener Projects.)

Find by Formatting is most useful when you’re revising your draft. As you progress to your second or third draft, you may want to find changes you’ve made using Scrivener’s Revision Mode. You can go through your documents searching for different revision levels to check on all your changes.

Another way to use Find by Formatting is to find colored text. In Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 63, actor and birder Lili Taylor shared how she uses this feature. She changes the color of texts that she might want to delete from her projects, then goes back to them later. “Graying out text that I might not use is better than striking through or deleting it. I do that with a very quick keyboard shortcut. Then, with Scrivener, I use Find by Formatting [to find colored text] in gray. I go through my whole document. Once I think I could let go of this gray text, I don’t think I’m going to use this anymore, I take all my gray text out, and I put it into a new document I call Gray.”

Find by Formatting can also be useful if you use inline annotations of different colors to indicate priority for items to check or correct. You can search by color, finding the highest-priority annotations to resolve, then search for the others.

Using Find by Formatting

When you display the Find by Formatting dialogue as mentioned above and start searching for text, the dialogue remains visible above your Scrivener window. You can move it to the side of the screen, and you can go through formatted text found using the Next or Previous buttons on the dialogue. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to do this:

• On Mac: Find Next Formatting (Command-Option-Shift-G) / Find Previous Formatting (Control-Option-Shift-G)
• On Windows: Find Next Formatting (Shift+G) / Find Previous Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+G)

This allows you to quickly step through text formatted in specific ways to find those bits of text, comments, or annotations that you want to change or delete.

While Find by Formatting is not something you’ll use often, it is valuable when editing or revising your draft. As one of Scrivener’s powerful search tools, it gives you another option to find anything in your projects.