Find / Replace character override?

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
August 16, 2025
2 replies
433 views

Hi,

I'm formatting a huge document - I have paragraph styles set up (no italics), but have a ton of book names that need italics. I created a character style for them and am going through manually updating them. How can i use find and replace to do this easier? This document is 150 pages.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

You can also use Find/Replace Font from the Type menu (sorry don't remember the exact phrasing it's different across the apps).

But you should be able to see the missing font, and choose a font to replace it, and there is a tick box to update the style also.

If you need that exact font - and there's no italic version of it - is to change the Character Style to the roman version of the font and add a Skew of about 12 degrees to make a fake italic.

But probably best to use a Font with the italic font available.

@Joel Cherney has shown a cool way to get around the issue and allows you to review each change on a find by find basis, which is actually probably safer in my eyes. It's only 150 pages shouldn't take long to review and change each.

If you're comfortable with a blanket change across the document then Find/Replace Font is the the way I'd consider.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

@Eugene Tyson the way I read this, the OP wants to assign the character style to the book titles, so I don't think Find Font (or whatever the current name is) will be a lot of help.

When I looked at the screen capture I was at a loss for finding a pattern that fit all the titles shown which would allow a simple find/change, but @Joel Cherney has pointed out I overlooked the most obvious pattern -- the missing font -- which while perhaps not intentional, is very fortuitous and provides the needed trigger to use fiind/change to apply the style.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

I think as @Joel Cherney pointed out that the font itself is not loaded - so it's shown in pink highlight - that's why I suggested it.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Well, the pink highlighting indicates that the italic part has dropped, right? You can use that to your advantage.

My example here happens to be in Pashto, but it works in English just as well. If the English was typeset in Helvetica Neue, then all of the book-names would have fonts like "Helvetica Neue 57 Condensed Oblique" applied. So if I changed all the fonts to Noto Sans Arabic, then the italic bits would be named "Noto Sans Arabic 57 Condensed Oblique." Of course, Noto Sans doesn't have italics named in this way, so it shows up as a dropped font - with pink highlight, and with brackets around the "57 Condensed Oblique" part.

Like so:

You can use this because the "[57 Condensed Oblique]" part shows up as a separate face in the Format section of the Find/Change window:

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.