I never knew of the existence of stylesheets until the copyedit came back for my first novel. They struck me as such a good idea that ever since I’ve tried (and failed) to keep one up to date as I’m writing a novel.
The reason why they fail is that I change my mind as to what style to use as I’m writing. For example, I couldn’t decide whether the antagonists in DREAM PARIS were pierrots or Pierrots. In COSMOPOLITAN PREDATORS!, I couldn’t decide whether a character was named young man or Young Man.
I came about the solution by using the occur function.
M-x occur pierrot
occur lists lines containing a regexp in a separate buffer. Since Emacs regexps are case insensitive by default, the above finds both pierrot and Pierrot. It opens a buffer rather like the one in the self referential example below:
7 matches in 5 lines for "pierrot" in buffer: workout.org 16:The reason why they fail is that I change my mind as to what style to use as I'm writing. For example, I couldn't decide whether the antagonists in my most recently completed novel, DREAM PARIS were pierrots or Pierrots. In COSMOPOLITAN PREDATORS!, I couldn't decide whether a character was named young man or Young Man. 21:M-x occur pierrot 24:Emacs regexps are case insensitive by default, so the above finds pierrot and Pierrot. It opens a buffer rather like the example below: 31:M-s h l pierrot 34:highlights lines with pierrot in.
Clicking or hitting enter on a line in the Occur buffer jumps you to the original location in the text.
A big advantage of occur is that you can look at the words in situ before deciding on the final style and running a query-replace-regexp to replace them all.
Another useful mode in when looking at styles is hi-lock mode.
M-s h l pierrot
The above highlights lines containing the regexp pierrot.
A really useful feature of hi-lock mode is that it highlights on the fly, highlighting lines as you type in the words. I use this feature to act as a reminder of whether I’m typing in the right (or wrong) style.
As a bonus, hi-lock mode allows you to choose from a pallete of colours. Use M-n and M-p to scroll through the choices, or enter your own choice – very useful when tracking more than one style.
Tony, it’s probably worth knowing that in occur-mode if you press “e” you can start editing, doing “C-c C-c” you get out of that edition mode. That means that there’s not even need to click and jump to the buffer where the text lives for changing what you want!
LikeLike
Great tip! Thanks Ignacio!
LikeLike