I’m not against a Preview like search, but I think it consumes too much space for a quick find option and space was one of the main topic of this request.nicka wrote:For Mellel's quick find function, I'd prefer an Apple Preview-like find to a Firefox-like find.
The main difference is that in Preview you get a scrollable list of hits in their order in the document, whereas in Firefox you have to keep pressing Apple-G to jump from one hit to the next.
Furthermore I think that one tends to use both applications (Mellel & Preview) quite differently. With Mellel you usually write your own stuff and know or at least have an idea what’s inside your document, maybe you even know where (in which chapter) you like to find something. With Preview however, you open and search all kind of documents, created form people all over the world and with content you’ve never heard of.
If you open the Mellel Guide for example with Preview, you could easily search for a feature you like to know more about. Let‘s assume you need advanced knowledge about tabs, so you’ll enter “Tab” into the Preview search. In this case, it’s quite important to see the results list, because the find option finds “TAB”, “TABular”, “TABle”, “prinTABle”, “daTABase” and maybe other things that aren’t related to your initial search. So a results list is quite handy in this case and helps you quickly to sort out the wrong results.
In Mellel, I use the find option often to jump to a specific section, to check all instances of a word (if a name is written correctly in all cases) or do other searches, where a results list isn’t as helpful as in Preview. If the search option has a “Highlight All” option like Firefox, you could visually sort out wrong results very fast too.
So a results list would be (IMHO) a nice addition to the advanced search. On the other hand, Apple’s Pages offers exactly that. You have one sidebar (similar to the Outline area) in which you could open a Preview-like search option or you could display miniature pictures of your pages. I would be happy too, if you could switch the view of Mellel’s outline area to a Preview like search but I don‘t know, if others like to see both, the quick search and the outline.