Detecting local formatting on a large scale

[tillulen]

I want to find and fix all instances of local formatting in a large document. The local formatting I’m dealing with is random, it can affect a single word or even one character.

Often, the fix is to clear the local formatting. Sometimes it involves creating a new style and applying it. Most often, some aspects of the previously applied local formatting go into a style and others are cleared.

What are my options with Publisher to find every place where local formatting has been applied? Any pointers would help me tremendously. Currently I don’t know of any way to do that, save for going over all text character by character. Obviously, sometimes the local formatting is invisible or hard to spot, otherwise I would just visually scan the document.

Edited November 10, 2020 by tillulen

[walt.farrell]

Is it some kind of consistent local formatting in all cases such that you could search for it (e.g., italic or bold or something like that)? Or does it vary?

 

[tillulen]

8 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Is it some kind of consistent local formatting in all cases such that you could search for it (e.g., italic or bold or something like that)? Or does it vary?

It varies. It can be italic, font and size, leading, language settings, no-break formatting or other kinds of formatting.

[Old Bruce]

Hi @tillulen,

I wonder what you mean by ‘fix’ when you say you want to find and fix the local formatting. Your list of things to find includes different fonts and sizes as well as italic and bold formatting.
We can go and fix all the italic by searching for it and applying a Character Style called Italic, same with bold text. If you have text in Gill Sans 16pt and a few characters/words in Courier 14pt. We can search for that if we know that there are instances of Courier (with or without specifying the size). But what is the fix in that situation? Do we want to keep the Courier or change it to Gill Sans? Same with colour of text or superscript or subscript numbers or baseline shifts.
Essentially we need to know, or at least suspect. that there are instances and we can search for them but what is the fix required?
I would set up Character styles for the things I wish to retain (Bold, Italic or Changed Font (to indicate something important)) and search and apply then go and reset the Paragraph style for the rest getting rid of local formatting which is not a character style.

[walt.farrell]

I think that Old Bruce has raised a good question.

There are several ways to reset all the formatting, and this can be easily done if all the text is in a set of text frames that flow together. But it would include resetting any paragraph styles, and would end up with all the text having the same style, which may be resetting more than you're wanting to reset.