Gone is the hassle of trying to find a few results among many more. The new Scope setting provides six searchable scopes for focusing the Find and Replace Panel on a portion of a document.
The first option, Document, provides the same document-wide search results as in earlier versions of Affinity Publisher. The other five options are all new, so let’s take a closer look at them.
Sections
To use the Section option, you’ll need to have divided your document into smaller parts using the Section Manager, which is accessed on the Pages Panel.
Searching by section helps you to work through documents in smaller, more manageable chunks.
Sections might equate to individual chapters, but ultimately it’s your call on what they represent.
Sections might be groups of related, consecutive chapters that form a thematic ‘Part’ or groups of 10 pages that you can subedit more comfortably, for example.
Spreads and Pages
The Spread and Page options are exactly as they sound, allowing you to pinpoint matching text within a specific area.
If there are multiple text objects on the current spread or page—body text, captions, artistic text, headers and footers—they’ll all be searched, including text objects inherited from master pages, but you won’t see results from anywhere else in your document.
Knowing which is the current page
When searching a section, spread or page, Affinity uses the current page to identify where to search. There are various ways you can do this.
The current page is highly likely to be the one you’re looking at in the document view, and so the most immediate method is to simply click/tap on the page, being careful not to affect content.
If the current tool will create an object when you do this, another new feature in Affinity Publisher 2.2 is helpful. Hold the V key to temporarily select the Move Tool, click/tap the page, and then release the key to switch back to your previous tool. This even works on iPad when using a hardware keyboard.
Story
Use the Story option to find text in a sequence of linked text frames. Only one of the linked text frames needs to be selected.
This scope is suited to searching main text that flows across multiple pages. Any secondary text presented alongside—e.g. sidebars, captions, and even text inherited from master pages, such as headers and footers—is ignored.
Selection
Setting the search scope to Selection allows you to find text in specific objects or text ranges. You might want to locate a term in a specific newspaper story, for example.
As an example, let’s take a technology article in which the acronym ‘RAM’ is used to fit a caption within a very limited character count. However, the publication’s style guide instructs to avoid using jargon, and to use the word ‘memory’ in this case.
If all your captions’ layers are named ‘caption’, simply select one, choose Select > Select Same > Name to quickly select them, and then use the Selection scope to swap out the unwanted term. The Preflight Panel will alert you if any changes have resulted in overset text.
Use find and replace with fields
Update to Affinity Publisher 2.3 or later and you’ll be able to use the Find and Replace Panel to find instances of fields and replace text with fields.
This includes custom fields you’ve added to the Fields Panel. You might use one to ensure a product name is consistent throughout a document, for example.
In a scenario like this, later changes to the value won’t even require the Find and Replace Panel. Instead, change it on the Fields Panel and Affinity will automatically update all instances of the field in your document.