Publisher: Use Find command to find whole words that have partial formatting?

[big smile]

Affinity Publisher's find and replace functionally is beyond awesome as it can find many things. 

However, is there anyway to find whole words that have partial formatting. 

 

Example:

Welcome to this house. 

In the above example, the word "this" has partially formatting, as only the last the 3 letters of "this" have bold and underline and the first letter is not formatted. 

Is there anyway I can search for partially formatted words?

In this example, I know that the word "this" is partially formatted, so I can enter "this" into the find box. But in my use case, I don’t actually know which words in my long document have partial formatting. So I would need a search query that can find partially formatted whole words without me having to input the actual words in the find box. 

I know this is a strange use case, but there are some wizards on this forum, so I am hoping someone can help me out! Thanks!.

 

[walt.farrell]

I don't think that would be possible, for two reasons:

1. A regular expression cannot detect the formatting of characters; that requires use of the Formatting cog for the Find term.
2. The Formatting options do not recognize words, and cannot detect parts of strings of letters, and apply to the entire Find string.

[David in Яuislip]

LibreOffice might help
Copy text from Publisher
Paste into LibreOffice Writer
Do Format/Spotlight Character Direct Formatting 

[big smile]

53 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I don't think that would be possible, for two reasons:

1. A regular expression cannot detect the formatting of characters; that requires use of the Formatting cog for the Find term.
2. The Formatting options do not recognize words, and cannot detect parts of strings of letters, and apply to the entire Find string.

I did worry it might not be possible. Thanks anyway!

 

Just now, David in Яuislip said:

LibreOffice might help
Copy text from Publisher
Paste into LibreOffice Writer
Do Format/Spotlight Character Direct Formatting 

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, for this project, the way it is set up would make copy and pasting from Publisher too cumbersome. Thanks for the suggestion, anyway, as it's quite a smart idea!

[David in Яuislip]

Ok my very last idea, write to svg and look for oddities
<text x="258.744px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">P</text>
<text x="325.443px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">art</text>
<text x="442.143px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">ial f</text>
<text x="597.758px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'Arial-ItalicMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-style:italic;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">orm</text>
<text x="769.975px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">atting is</text>
<text x="1142.39px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#f04a34;">ha</text>
<text x="1253.62px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">rd to s</text>
<text x="1531.5px" y="481.227px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:100px;fill:#231f20;">pot</text>

[walt.farrell]

If you know for sure the kind of mixed formatting you're looking for, you could make a copy of your .afpub and try this in the copy: 

1. Do a regular expression Find for (\w+)  with the formatting set to whatever is causing the issue. 

Set Replace to #\1#

2. After you run the replace operation, do another regular expression Find for (\w#|#\w)

That should help find any words with that specific mixed formatting.

(Untested.)

[thomaso]

If your goal is to correct these local formattings AND you have saved/named character styles assigned to the desired variations, you can use the "Reset Formatting" button to remove the style variations that are not applied as a saved style.

If you want to remove any local formatting (character style) yo can choose the according option by reassigning a certain paragraph style.