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I write my dialog in this format:

Joe: Why are you wearing a shoe on your head?
Sam: Mind your own damn business!

What's annoying here is that it doesn't automatically capitalize the word following the colon. Is there a way to automatically capitalize the first word after a colon like it's the start of a sentence, but only for these specific instances? Or just in general?

I don't actually mind if I have to undo an auto capitalized word here and there when I used a colon in the middle of a sentence, as it's a lot less common in my writing, but fixing the first letter after every colon in a dialog heavy scene is tedious...

I'm using the Windows version (Version 1.9.9.0) of the tool .

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  • 1
    This is for scriptwriting, right? (Asking for tag purposes)
    – Galastel supports GoFundMonica
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 0:10
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    @Galastel Sorta, yeah. The way I write is a bit like script writing, but it's not strictly script writing, just sort of free form writing with some script writing elements, if that makes sense.
    – user23083
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 0:33
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    Makes sense. Still looks like the tag would be useful - people writing script in scrivener would probably be able to help / be looking to solve a similar problem and might benefit from the same answers.
    – Galastel supports GoFundMonica
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 0:47
  • It's good that you mention the version and operating system now, but please also explicitly mention in the question body when you are asking about a tool. Adding the tag alone is not enough. Tags are used to categorize questions, but all the necessary information that someone needs to answer your questions should be in the text part of the question body.
    – Secespitus
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 8:46
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    In normal regex, finding (: \w) and replacing it with \U$1 will do what you want (albeit after the fact as cleanup). This works in Word. Unfortunately, Scrivener doesn't seem to honour the replacement portion, and replaces what it correctly finds with the literal text. I had thought to put this into an answer, if it had worked in Scrivener.
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Mar 26, 2019 at 13:54

1 Answer 1

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+250

As of today, it cannot be done in one pass from within Scrivener. I did spend a good amount of time researching this, and I discovered that Scrivener does not support GNU extensions in regex.

On the other hand, there is a "simple" solution. It is deadly tedious, but it only require 26 search-replace iterations (as opposed to scanning your entire text manually).

In project replace, just type ": a" in the find field and ": A" in the replace field. Repeat for each letter of the alphabet.

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  • Note that these changes could be done during the compiling stage using external scripts or services, but that does not seem to be what the op is asking.
    – NofP
    Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 9:28

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