Search/replace for fonts and styles

[marguerite]

As I struggle via Darth Processor (aka Word) to prepare my Storyist export for processing in InDesign, I realize that it would be super to be able, while still in Storyist, to:

1. Search for italics and convert them to another font that could then be converted to X Italic (Word does not recognize, say, Times New Roman Italic as separate from Times New Roman, Italic); and

 

2. Search for the equivalent of ^p^t or ^p^w and replace it with a paragraph break, for certain fellow authors who cannot master the basics of modern typesetting.

 

I do plan to load the RTF file directly into ID to see if that helps, but still, more flexibility on Search/Replace would be useful. It is the one area where Word still triumphs over almost every competitor.

Best,

M

[Steve]

Thanks M.

 

 

1. Search for italics and convert them to another font that could then be converted to X Italic (Word does not recognize, say, Times New Roman Italic as separate from Times New Roman, Italic); and

 

Are you imagining doing this individually, or would a "select all occurrences of formatting" command (after which you would select a new font) suffice?

 

2. Search for the equivalent of ^p^t or ^p^w and replace it with a paragraph break, for certain fellow authors who cannot master the basics of modern typesetting.

 

Regular expressions are complex beasts. By the way, TextSoap does a pretty good job of cleaning up poorly formatted text. It doesn't preserve styles though.

 

I do plan to load the RTF file directly into ID to see if that helps, but still, more flexibility on Search/Replace would be useful. It is the one area where Word still triumphs over almost every competitor.

 

Agreed on the utility. It would be nice to select all occurrences of a style too.

 

-Steve

 

 

-Steve

[marguerite]

Thanks M.

 

Are you imagining doing this individually, or would a "select all occurrences of formatting" command (after which you would select a new font) suffice?

 

Regular expressions are complex beasts. By the way, TextSoap does a pretty good job of cleaning up poorly formatted text. It doesn't preserve styles though.

 

Agreed on the utility. It would be nice to select all occurrences of a style too.

 

-Steve

Select all occurrences of formatting and replace with a given font would be perfect. Then I could change the font in Storyist to something not used elsewhere in he document and replace it in Word with Times New Roman Italic as Word understands it.

 

Sorry to hear that regular expressions are unruly beasties. I can continue changing them through Word. I just have to remember once in a while to see where the extra space after the paragraph break is, so that I can fix it in Storyist. And murder my critique group partner who still aligns all her text with spaces....

Thanks for listening, anyhoo.

Best,

M

[marguerite]

I discovered quite by accident while working with a work file exported from InDesign that the solution to the fonts problem is almost embarrassingly simple: before doing anything else, Select All and apply the base font (say, Times New Roman). Word converts the whole document to the selected font while retaining the style overrides. Save and get on with life.

 

It would still be useful to search for regular expressions for those times when I am either importing a file from Word and realize belatedly that there are extra single spaces at the beginning of paragraphs or after heavy editing, where single spaces sometimes trail without being noticed. But this is a pretty trivial issue compared to hunting down and replacing 283 instances of italicization while Word shrugs its virtual shoulders and refuses to recognize any of them.

Best,

M