Finding and Replacing Text

Author-it's Find and Replace Text feature can find any characters or words in your document and optionally replace it with different text. You can search for matches in:

• The currently selected block of text, or
• The currently open topic, or
• The currently selected objects in the Library Explorer, or
• All topics in the current Book, or
• All topics in the Library.

When you replace text, the format and case (CAPITALS, Title Case, Sentence case, lowercase) of the text are ignored, unless you specify otherwise.

Note: Because the heading of a topic is not saved as part of its contents, the Find and Replace Text feature will not affect topic headings. You will need to use Author-it's Object Search to find these, and then manually change them one by one.

To Find and Replace Text

1. Start the Find Text feature:
   • From the main toolbar, or the topic editor toolbar, click the button

   -OR-

   • From the main menu, or book editor menu, choose the Edit > Find option. The Find and Replace window appears.

   

2. In the Find what field, type the text you are looking for.
   • To find the text you typed only if it is a whole word (not part of a word), make sure that Find whole word only is ticked. You will usually leave this checkbox blank so that you can type in a word and find most variants of it - for example, if you type "author", you could also find "authors" and "authoring".
   • To find only text that has the same case (CAPITALS, Title Case, Sentence case, lowercase) as the text you typed, make sure that Match case on Find is ticked.
3. In the Replace with field, type the text you want to replace the original text with.
   • To match the case of the text you typed when replacements are made, make sure that Match case on Replace is cleared. Otherwise replacement text will match the case of the text that was found.
4. Choose the direction to search in.
5. Choose where to search:
   • Selected Text - Searches the range of selected text in the active Topic.
   • Current Topic - Searches the currently active Topic.
   • Selected Objects - Searches the currently selected objects in the Library Explorer.
   • Current Book - Searches all Topics in the active Book.
   • Whole Library - Searches all Topics in the Library.
6. To begin searching, choose the Find Next button. Author-it finds the next occurrence of the text and highlights it. You can make changes to the topic as usual.
   • If you are searching across more than the current topic, each topic containing the text is opened one by one, and any changes you make to each topic are automatically saved when you move to the next topic.
   • If no occurrences are found, a message appears. Choose OK to close the message window. You may want to try specifying different text to search for, then try again.
7. If you have specified replacement text:
   • To replace the highlighted text, choose the Replace button. Author-it replaces the selected text, and waits until you tell it to find the next occurrence by choosing Find Next again. You can check that the replaced text is how you want it before you continue.
   • To skip replacing this occurrence of the highlighted text, choose Find Next.
   • To replace all occurrences of the text, choose Replace All.

     Note: If you choose Replace All when you have selected All Topics in Book, or All Topics In Folder, or All Topics in Library, your changes can not be un-done. Be very careful.

8. A message appears when you have searched the entire area you specified earlier. Choose OK to close the message dialog, then Cancel to close the Find and Replace Text window.