Nisus Writer Express - Manual (Page 197)

Polishing & Managing Documents 177
• find all UPPERCASE or Capitalized words.
• change the sequence of words
• to find all underlined words
As you experiment, always remember to back up your document before trying any new procedure.
You may have already used Nisus Writer Express’s standard Find and Replace feature to perform
simple substitutions—for example, replacing one word with another throughout your document.
Sometimes, however, you need more flexibility in what you search for, or you may want to do more
complex substitutions. PowerFind allows you to include variables, and parenthesized expressions in
your Find Expression to narrow the search down to exactly what you want. Should you reach the
limits of PowerFind’s flexibility, you can move on to PowerFind Pro for virtually unlimited find and
replace capability.
This section has an example to show you how easy it is to use PowerFind to find phrases that
contain variables. It also explains the parts of a find expression and the logic Nisus Writer Express
follows to complete a find procedure. In the example, you’ll also convert the PowerFind expression
that defines the search to a PowerFind Pro expression. This step gives you an idea of the difference
between these two search types.
PowerFind Terminology
A good understanding of the terms and concepts described below will help you learn to use
PowerFind (and, later, if you want, PowerFind Pro) more effectively.
A metacharacter is a PowerFind command or symbol.
8 Metacharacters denote a specific character or
set of characters and can represent variables, number of repetitions, and so on. PowerFind displays
the metacharacter symbols in a user-friendly manner using natural language words and phrases in
a “bubble”. You can customize the color of these as explained in the section “Determine the Color of
Various Aspects of Your Nisus Writer Express Working Environment” on page 230.
Figure 162
A PowerFind metacharacter
PowerFind finds literal text exactly as it is entered. Literal text means characters that have no
special meaning on their own (that is, they are not “meta” “characters”). The PowerFind mode
considers all text to be literal; it will find exactly what you type.
An expression consists of one or more metacharacters, literal text, or any combination of
metacharacters and literal text used to define or describe what you want to find. Which is why we
say at the beginning of this section that “If you can describe it, you can find it, and if you can find
it, you can change it to anything else you can describe.”
A wild card is a metacharacter that assumes the identity of one or more characters in a search
expression. For example, the wild card in Figure 162 looks for any digit.
The PowerFind Find expression
first looks for an open parenthesis, then the string of characters “part number” followed by a space
and any sequence of one or more digits then a close parenthesis.
PowerFind Example
Suppose you want to find all the capitalized words in your document. You can quickly create a
PowerFind expression that will find all words beginning with any capital letter in a single step—
regardless of how many letters are in the word or what the letters are. And if you want to be more
specific—say, finding all capitalized words except those beginning with P, you can easily convert
your PowerFind expression to a PowerFind Pro expression and make the needed adjustments. For
instructions on how to convert PowerFind expressions to PowerFind Pro expressions see page 181.
8 The term “metacharacter” refers to the character standing for something beyond the “normal” “literal” or “usual”
meaning of the character (similar to the use of the word “metaphysics”).