Search for text NOT in a particular paragraph style

Hey, we both learned something here today. Glad you got it figured out.

~Barb

If all of your regular text is in black – a fairly reasonable assumption – then:

1. Change the color of your not-wanted paragraph style to Red.

2. Search for your phrase and specify its color must be black.

3. When satisfied, change the main paragraph color back to black.

If you have multicolored text: you can use any text attribute to rule out your style. Only (I think) three things count: use something that you did not use anywhere in the text as a "proper" attribute (and particularly if you suspect that you might have used it in manual overrides rather than character styles), use something that does not cause the text to reflow (usually highly preferred, unless you are still in a preparation phase), and make sure to use something that appears in the Find/Change dialog, as there are a handful of properties that do not.

Other than plain text color, my preferred method as it is highly visible, you could try weird stuff such as the text outline color (without setting a width) and the Underline Gap Color.

Hi Zimbop:

As you suspect, you can limit a search to a specific paragraph or character style, but not specify that that it matches anything but a specified style.

Maybe it would be helpful if the search in Story Editor view so that you can just glance at the paragraph style in the styles column at the left of the window as you examine each match? Not sure, since we don't know exactly what you are looking for.

~Barb