Help with Find and Replace

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DanZac
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Help with Find and Replace

Post by DanZac »

I am trying to create a Find and Replace that moves a comma or period before a footnote/endnote number within the text. I thought the Citation element would find the superscript number within the body, but it isn't finding it.

So essentially, how do I find any footnote # mark in the body?
ealvarez
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by ealvarez »

Have you tried "alphanumeric" and looking specifically for footnotes?
Icelander
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by Icelander »

DanZac wrote: Wed Jul 10, 2019 5:41 pm I am trying to create a Find and Replace that moves a comma or period before a footnote/endnote number within the text.
You want to move them or remove them?

The superscripted note Reference symbol (in the document text) is not a Citation, therefore "Search in Citations" won't find what you want, of course.
Icelander
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by Icelander »

ealvarez wrote: Wed Jul 10, 2019 6:22 pm Have you tried "alphanumeric" and looking specifically for footnotes?
Did you try this yourself? If you did, you would have seen that this doesn't work. "Search in Footnotes" will only find text in footnotes, that is, note text.

If I understand the original poster's intention correctly, then he is looking for characters followed by a note reference symbol. As far as I can see, the Mellel search engine is lacking this very important option of finding characters followed or preceded by something. I already asked about this in the thread below, but nobody answered, not even Eyal, so I guess this is impossible.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3653&p=19579&hilit=preceded#p19579

There seems to be no way to find a note Reference symbol in the text body. However, it's possible to find and select a whole chunk of note text by using 'Anything' and "Search in Footnotes". Thus one can jump from one note text to the next one.

I tried to create a new Note Stream and assign the Reference symbol a certain conspicuous character style, such as Red, in the hope that I might be able to find the Reference symbols by searching for this particular character style. But alas, to no avail. What I find really frustrating is that the Reference symbol turns up having the color 'red', which is good, but this is NOT reflected in the Character Palette, as one would expect. The Reference symbol still has the character style of the surrounding style…, although the default style <surrounding style> was already changed by me in Insert –> Note –> Edit note attributes…
Is this a bug?
Last edited by Icelander on Sun Jun 14, 2020 9:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DanZac
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by DanZac »

Thanks Icelander for confirming that isn't an ability. I'm actually doing editing for a book of essays, and some authors are place the comma or period after the footnote number in the body of the text, and I want to move it to before with a find and replace.
Bulow
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by Bulow »

Oh yes, in German and French they put the punctuation after the note reference, in English and Danish, before. And then, of course, there are all those who just do not know where to put it. I have been correcting this sort of thing manually for years, for I have never found a way in Mellel. If you have time - you usually do not - send it back to the authors and ask them to get it right.
Bülow
ealvarez
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by ealvarez »

Icelander wrote: Fri Jul 12, 2019 3:24 pm
ealvarez wrote: Wed Jul 10, 2019 6:22 pm Have you tried "alphanumeric" and looking specifically for footnotes?
Did you try this yourself?
I did try indeed, but I wasn't 100% sure it was what Dan was looking for. So my question.
DanZac
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Re: Help with Find and Replace

Post by DanZac »

ealvarez, unless you're doing something I don't know how to do, this doesn't work.

So for instance, if I search for "[alphanumeric]." I get the end of every single sentence, when I'm only looking for this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bm1i3z22xc44j ... l.jpg?dl=0
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