Applying text styles without breaking the character formatting

[Hussard64]

As an old InDesign user, I would like to request in Publisher the following.

When you imported a Word text in Publisher all the text styles of the Word file are applied in Publisher.

What I would like to do is applying to selected text once the Text styles defined in Publisher by clicking the text style in text style tab meaning that the font, font size, justification,  and leading override of the selected text will be changed without touching the character formatting as bold, italic, superscript, small caps, .... Then a '+' sign will be placed next to the style meaning that only the core text font has been replaced but not the character formatting and when applying a second time the formatting then all the special formatting is gone. Then a text style formatting in two steps.

Why asking that ? Because when you import a text from Word coming from an external supplier, the styles defined in Word are not the same as the one you want to use in your text. But you don't want to override everything and especially not all character formatting as bold, italic, superscript, subscript, small caps.... which will be very cumbersome to do again.

[Oufti]

This is perhaps not the way you imagined (in a double step) but in Affinity, by clicking the 3-bars button next to the text style name in the Text Styles panel, you can though apply paragraph style while preserving either characters styles or local formatting.

 

[MikeTO]

@Oufti FYI I already suggested this in another thread but it's a long document and he'd have to do this for every single style change.

The real issue is that there's no way to map styles in imported text to existing styles in a document. And there's no way to replace all instances of a style with another style while retaining character or local formatting, you can only do it one instance at a time.

[Oufti]

@MikeTO Ooch, sorry.

I totally agree with you on this:

On 2/25/2024 at 9:38 PM, MikeTO said:

It would be nice if Publisher allowed us to map MS Word's text styles to Publisher's text styles during import but Publisher doesn't have that feature. Maybe someday.

[Seneca]

16 hours ago, Hussard64 said:

But you don't want to override everything and especially not all character formatting as bold, italic, superscript, subscript, small caps.... which will be very cumbersome to do again.

I would define Character Styles for Bold, Italic, etc. in Publisher and would find and replace all occurrences of the above with the character styles you defined earlier. That would take you only a couple of minutes.

Once you've done that you are free to apply any paragraph styles etc and the character formatting will remain unchanged.

[macrobb]

Hi, I support to the same.
I have a wish to the functionality of the text style function.
When I copied a text block from another publisher document in my current document, the text style will also copied. When this text style is the same (name) in my document, it will added as style “XY 1”. But the name of the text style doesn’t matter.
Till here is all o.k.
But now I would like easy transform the style ”XY 1” to my existing style “XY“, because I have had little modifications like e.g. changed the language (hyphenation program).
This is current not possible and I need a lot of time, work and risk of errors to do that.
Because I delete the imported text style with “To remove all text styles from a document but leave text unaffected" and link it to the existing one.
On long documents with a lot of changing style is horrible. I would like to tidy it up and keep it clear.

The function to change text style “XY 1” or whatever to “XY”. Thats all I need. Would be very helpfull!

Thanks
Robert

[MikeTO]

@macrobb Publisher doesn't have a feature to change all the text formatted in one style to another, but you can do this easily enough with Find and Replace after importing the text.

1. Choose Edit > Find
2. Click the Gear icon beside Find and then select the style name to change from - you can select a paragraph or character style
3. Click the Gear icon beside Replace and select the style name to change to
4. Click the Find button
5. Click the Replace All button

Do this for each of the styles you want to change.

Cheers

[Oufti]

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Do this for each of the styles you want to change.

And thereafter eventually delete the unused styles, which can be done in one click via the three bars button  (aka hamburger button) on the right of the Text styles tab. 

[macrobb]

Thanks, thats what I’m looking for. To do this with Find and Replace I didn’t come up with this idea.

And of course delete the unsused styles.