Publisher: Is negation supported in format searches?

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi,

I'm the author of this query regarding a global text format change, in which I globally changed all text that was formatted as "pure black" (CMYK 0.0.0.100) to "rich black" (CMYK 60.40.40.100).  One of the problems I faced before making the global change was to make sure that all of the text that I wanted to change was "pure black" to begin with, and I was able to do this by exporting my Publisher document as a press-ready PDF, opening that PDF in Acrobat, and viewing the pages with the black color channel turned off, as any visible text would indicate that it wasn't "pure text" to begin with.  After sufficient iterations of modifying the text color in Publisher and viewing the exported PDF in Acrobat, I got all of the "black" text to be "pure black", after which the global format change worked well.

Now my document is complete, and as a final check, I'd like to verify that all of the "black" text in the document is the "rich black" that I want.  The easiest way to accomplish this, if possible, would be to run a "negated" format search, which would find all text that did NOT have the color (CMYK 60.40.40.100).  Is this currently possible?  I don't see any option to specify a "not" condition in the "find" settings.  The only other options I can think of to accomplish this would be to search for (CMYK 60.40.40.100) and be on the lookout for text that isn't found, or to convert all of the text back to "pure black" and to do the global format conversion once again, both of which will be rather tedious.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[walt.farrell]

There's no "not" capability when searching for format info. 

I would make a copy of the document, and in the copy do a Find for all the text that has the right color format, and replace it. For example, Replace with a single space, or a single _, and then look for any text that still exists.

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

There's no "not" capability when searching for format info. 

I would make a copy of the document, and in the copy do a Find for all the text that has the right color format, and replace it. For example, Replace with a single space, or a single _, and then look for any text that still exists.

Hi walt.farrell,

Thanks for the information and for the suggestion.  I had just come back here to report that I had figured out that I could do something similar to what you had suggested, but instead of changing the character, to change the color to something garish (in my case, 100% magenta), to make any remaining "black" text stand out.  Modifying your suggestion, I'll also try changing all "found" text to white, which should make it invisible.

Thanks again,

Ken

 

[walt.farrell]

Good idea for the color modification; I had thought of suggesting a garish color, too, but thought that small bits of text might still not be noticed. White should take care of that

[Ken Hjulstrom]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Good idea for the color modification; I had thought of suggesting a garish color, too, but thought that small bits of text might still not be noticed. White should take care of that

Hi Walt,

In my case, I ended up using both a garish color and also white as the replacement, as both had their advantages.  The garish color worked quite well at revealing the remaining black text, and white worked better, except I had to think for a few seconds when the white text revealed itself in areas where the document had black text on a gray background.  The ideal method would have been to use a "format" of "invisible", but I wasn't able to find an option to accomplish this.

Thanks,

Ken

[walt.farrell]

53 minutes ago, Ken Hjulstrom said:

The ideal method would have been to use a "format" of "invisible", but I wasn't able to find an option to accomplish this.

Manually, it would look like this from the Context Toolbar:

 

Or like this from the Format options for Replace in the Find and Replace panel (which is basically how it would look in editing a Text Style, too):