curly quotes for entire manuscript

Is there a way to select the entire manuscript so that I can convert my straight quotes to smart quotes all at once instead of having to select the text scene by scene? I tried Ctrl-A, but that only selects the current text, and I looked at Project replace, but couldn’t figure out how to search for straight quotes and replace them with smart quotes. I figure it might be coding, but I don’t know what it is.

Thanks!

I hesitate to advise, because this is easy on a Mac but maybe not in Windows.
Select all the texts that you want to revise (Click-Shift-Click from start to finish)
Format-Convert-Quotes-Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes
(Those are all Mac conventions; I dunno from Windoze)

I never use “Smart” Quotes myself because publishers and printers prefer Straight.
And I don’t care for the look of curlies, but that’s a personal opinion.

Good luck!

Once you have selected whatever you want in the Binder (or just select the Draft folder), you need to get into Scrivenings Mode (what is it called now? Group Mode? – anyway, it is on the toolbar). This will make your Editor pane show all your (selected) documents as one – then you can click in there and Select All.

This group mode is one of the super awesome features of Scriv.

Greg
(Also speaking on the basis of the Mac version)

Thank you, thank you! I think that did it! It took me a minute to find Scrivenings mode, but once I got into it, I was able to select everything!

I may have to change the smart quotes back to tstraight in the future, but at least now I’ll be able to do it all at once, instead of scene by scene.

The Compile function can transform smart quotes to straight for you when it creates your output. So, you will never need to actually change this back in your Scriv documents.

Compile > Summary

or for more fine grained control:

Compile > All Options > Transformations

It is a wonderful feature of Scrivener that it gives you a great deal of latitude in setting up your work environment, because it is built with the understanding that how you want things to be set up for writing is not the same thing as how something must look in your final output.

And Scrivenings group mode is more than awesome.

Best,
gr

Ok, so something weird. Even in Scrivenings mode, when I Select All, only the text in the section my cursor was in gets selected. I don’t know if maybe this is a bug with the Windows mode or not. Which kind of defeats the Select All strategy.

Still, at least now I have some idea how to use Scrivenings mode. Thanks for the info, gr!

Make sure you are active in the Binder (far left pane) before selecting anything.
Then you want to select all the items or documents from top to bottom.
On the Mac, you hold down the Shift key to sustain the selection.
If you are active in the Editor, you can only Select All of that one text.

druid,

i think you are thinking of selecting every doc in the Binder, but getting the project docs Magycymste wants selected in the binder is not the trouble.

I think we got all the way to having the right multi-doc content presented altogether in the Editor using Scrivenings mode. But then Magycymste reports that Select All in the Editor still selects the text of just one of the docs that appear in the editor pane (whichever one the cursor is in).

That is definitely not how it goes in the Mac version, so it sounds like Magycymste needs some Windows-specific help at this point.

Any Scrivener for Windows mavens in the area? What’s up with that, Windows maven?

-gr

Hello there,
Am I missing something here? In the windows version surely Options/ corrections /substitutions takes care of smart quotes and many other changes. Maybe I’m wrong… too much wine…

Unfortunately, selecting across text file boundaries in Scrivenings mode is not possible in the Windows version. From my understanding, the implementation had to go with the “can do this now, even if it’s not optimal” approach. It’s a design limitation rather than a bug, in that it’s not a mistake in the code, but a limitation of how they had to put it together–a design flaw, if you will.

What is best to do at this point is to “select all” (ctrl+A) in each document, covert to smart quotes (ctrl+`), and then move on to the next document.

With that in mind, once this conversion is done, I highly recommend relying on the compile setting for straightening smart quotes (File->Compile->Transformation) whenever you need that, rather than going back through and converting them from smart to ‘dumb’.

It seems pretty non-intuitive, even for Mac. You have to:

1. Expand to all docs in the binder
   2.Select all docs in the binder
2. Make sure you are in Scrivenings mode
3. Click into text in the editor
4. Select all text
5. Then use the transformation command

It seems they do this to prevent inadvertently changing all text, but it would be much easier if there was a separate transformation command in the menu for ‘all documents’.

Scrivener is plenty non-intuitive already. It might be the rare program where you can select things in two locations simultaneously (Binder and Editor), but of course this gives it unique versatility as well.

Now if only compiling were less non-intuitive.

In the Mac version, and the coming version 3 for Windows, presumably, you can replace #1 and #2 with "select the Draft (aka: Manuscript, aka…) folder. And if you’re not aware, #5 is as easy as using the key combination CMD-a (mac) or CTRL-a (windows).