Find/Change character tags

[Guest]

Hi, I have a long document which uses lots of Bold text but not always with the Bold Character Tag applied. Much of the formatting was done 'on the fly' buy hitting Ctrl-B. I'd like to find all those instances of Bold text with no character tag applied and change them so that the Bold character tag is applied to them all. I've tried copying each example and finding/changing but it doesn't seem to be working. Can this be done? Any tips? Many thanks, Simon

[Art_Campbell1 · Accepted solution]

It's not too bad.

First, apply the Character tag to a word. Put the cursor in the word, but don't select it. Do a Copy Special > Character Format to put your Bold tag on the clipboard.

Put your cursor somewhere in a string that was set up with the Control-B override. Then do a Find > Character Format (NOT tag). A dialog box will pop up showing the attributes of the text passage.

Set Replace to From Clipboard.

Do a test Find and manual Replace to make sure it's doing what you want. Then turn it loose. It will likely find and replace all the existing strings of the Character Tag as well as the overrides, but no harm done.

Art

[Guest]

Brilliant, thank you Art. That did most of what I wanted to do but (probably for reasons within the documents) it skipped several individual words throughout the book that had Bold formatting but no tags. I guess I'll go and think about why that may be. Many thanks, Simon

[Art_Campbell1]

Just guessing, but the reason it probably skipped some words is because in the second step, where you sucked the format of the text string into the Find window, a font and size were specified.

Try it again, and set the font and/or size to AsIs and it'll broaden the search.

[Guest]

Hmm, it seems like it did far fewer of the find + changes than I'd thought. I'm following your steps precisely but the Find only seems to find one of my Paragraph Tags, which happens to be bold, and some random Bold words here and there. It's actually skipping the majority of instances. I've tried this with 'As Is' for every attribute except Weight and I've also used Font and Size. All to little avail. Stumped. Best, S

<Editing in>

When I do a 'test' new word on its own line (Ctrl-B formatting), the process finds that work and changes it okay. But it skips over other similar words within auto-numbered steps and in bullet lists, etc. I don't know whether there's a clue there?

[Mike Wickham]

The Character Tools plugin from http://siliconprairiesoftware.com can be

used to find these overrides. It's only $10 to buy it! Silicon Prairie

Software has several other very useful plugins, too. I highly recommend

them.

Mike Wickham

[Guest]

Yes, I have this tool already but can it help with what I'm trying to achieve? I can list used and unused tags and remove unsused tags and remove overrides but none of those help me apply my Bold character tag to text that was made bold on the fly. Cheers, Simon

[Guest]

Don't know how helpful this will be, but on the basis of a very quick experiment I've noticed two things:

• using "find character format" where you look for nothing but font weight "bold" (or "bolded", or whatever your font calls it) by setting everything else to "as is", you can skip merrily through the document and find both ctrl+b bold and applied-by-character-tag bold. So, if I had nothing else to do on a long rainy afternoon, I could change the colour on my character style, pick my way through the document and reset each ctrl+b bold I came across by using Esc, o, c, p or Format > Style > Plain. (or, even, carefully copy Plain to the clipboard as a format, step through the document with Find/Replace and replace by pasting where required).

• Alternatively, if I felt like living dangerously, I'd save the document as .mif and then use a text editor to look for FWeight `Bold' and delete the redundant information above and below the string affected. It appears from the .mif view that ctrl+b bold specifies the weight as a property of the font in use by leaving the character style as FTag `', while using a proper character style puts the bolded text between FTag `name of character style' and FTag `'.

Guess who's sitting through a long rainy afternoon <g>

N

[Guest]

Ooh, clever and intriguing stuff Thanks.

In the end I went back to the original process recommended by Art above and today, for some reason (maybe me being a little more careful) it worked fine. Once confirming that the Find/Change process was doing what I wanted, I tried 'Change All' for both Book and Document and each time Frame crashed. So I went through 'Change and Find' for each item individually. I may have lovely RSI now but the job seems to be done. Thanks all for the input.

Simon

[Arnis Gubins]

Simon,

You never mentioned which version of FM that you're using nor how the content was created. In earlier FM8 and 7.x versions, when searching for items that were imported from Word, things only went smoothly if one searched backwards through the FM files (due to some odd-ball codes that may have come across from the Word documents).

[Guest]

Ah, the book was created from scratch in FM 7.1 and later brought into Fm 8 and updated.