Hello, so I’ve written a lengthy text in another program with loads of speech, highlighting all of them one by one would literally take days. I’d like to use Libre Office as of now but can i somehow let the program automatically highlight everything between quotation marks? As in change color/italics etc. but everything else stays normal?
It depends on what quotation marks are used. If they are one of the paired marks (left/right pointing double/single angle quotation marks U+00AB «, U+00BB », U+2039 ‹, U+203A ›; left/right single/double quotation marks U+2018 ‘, U+2019 ’, U+201C “, U+201D ”; single/double low/high-reversed-9 quotation marks U+201A ‚, U+201B ‛, U+201E „, U+201F ‟), and they are used consistently to use one of them in the beginning, and the other in the end, then it’s rather easy, using a regular expression in Find & Replace dialog, like
«[^»]*»
then using Find All button, and then applying a properly created character style to make it trivial in the future to modify all the speech at once.
If you used simple quotation mark U+0022 ", both in the beginning and in the end of the speech, then it’s more complicated, and depends on if you have some rules consistently applied to your usage, like if they have spaces preceding opening and following closing quotation marks; possible full stops following closing marks; and also if you have used the mark for other purposes, like angular seconds. It would actually help if you used proper character styles from the beginning … then you’d not have this problem now.
Also note that built-in Find & Replace dialog may only find regular expressions limited to a single paragraph. You might need to use an extension, like AltSearch, if your speech might cross paragraphs’ boundaries.
You’re right i should have done it proberly but i did it “this way” sadly. It’s not supposed to be anything made for the public in the future, it basically is just a little writing exercise for myself only to get a little bit of regularity in writing english. It now became a little fleshed out story i’d like to put a little bit of eye candy on by making the speech different. It’s just normal sentences tho, everything between the quotation mark does end with a periot and there is no spaces in between.
edit: Had the tab open for some time and your addition just showed up after sending my message. I’ll fiddle around with your tips a little bit and see if i can get it working. If not i’d like to request further help if you’d allow. Cheers so far already.
Okay thankfully i put every beginning of speech in a new column so it will take some time but i should be able to simply replace the first " with a „ in not too long. I’ll replace every " with a ‟ afterwards. So a sentence will „Look like this‟. How should i procede from there?
In a simple case when each speech begins at the beginning of a paragraph starting with ", and there’s only a single run of speech in the paragraph, ending with another ", then using a simple regular expression ^".*" would match it. If you replace like you say, then modifying the regular expression from my answer to use the „‟ pair instead of «» would do: „[^‟]*‟