BryceB

Thanks Wosven! I tried your workaround and it worked for me. To remind myself how it works (and for those who aren't find & replace experts) I posted a screen capture to YouTube showing how I follow your steps. The search and replace with regular expressions is a little tricky if you've never done that kind of thing before.
Preserving bold and italic text when importing to Affinity Publisher.

Thanks Wosven! I tried your workaround and it worked for me. To remind myself how it works (and for those who aren't find & replace experts) I posted a screen capture to YouTube showing how I follow your steps. The search and replace with regular expressions is a little tricky if you've never done that kind of thing before.
Preserving bold and italic text when importing to Affinity Publisher.

@BryceB
Thanks for making that video. One thing I noticed in the discussion about regular expressions: unless Affinity Publisher's implementation of regexes is different from what I used in Perl, then:
.*
means not "one or more of any character" but "zero or more of any character." If you want "one or more," use:
.+
If Affinity Publisher supports this, there's also:
.?
... to mean "zero or one of the preceding character or expression (in this case: "any character"). Now of course I'm going to have to find out if it also supports greedy vs. non-greedy matches. How time will fly...
It was interesting to see that you were able to use "$1" for the "captured" buffer. A comment I saw here a couple of days ago used "\1" instead. So then I thought: Affinity Publisher must require "\1" rather than "$1". Clearly it doesn't.
In Perl, "\1" can be used in the replacement string but is more likely to be used within the search string — to refer to something captured to a buffer via parentheses — within the same search string.
I was surprised you were able to use "Apply 'Body' to Paragraphs". I would have thought the command should be "Apply 'Body' to paragraphs and preserve character formatting" (or "...and preserve local formatting").
After reading that Publisher doesn't yet support style merging, I'm tempted to go about it this way:
1. Style everything precisely as needed in the word-processing program (I use the Softmaker Office editor called TextMaker, which writes .docx format).
2. Import the word-processor file — Publisher will create new styles named to match those of the incoming document.
3. Tell Publisher just to delete all unused styles in the document.
Wonder if it'd work. :- )
 

Thanks Wosven! I tried your workaround and it worked for me. To remind myself how it works (and for those who aren't find & replace experts) I posted a screen capture to YouTube showing how I follow your steps. The search and replace with regular expressions is a little tricky if you've never done that kind of thing before.
Preserving bold and italic text when importing to Affinity Publisher.