Can I change all for font weight and color?

I need to go through many PDFs and change all in one of two ways:

  1. change all of some text from regular weight to bold (change [G] to [G]) OR
  2. change both font weight and color (change [G] in black font to [G] bold and red font).

From looking around, I have an idea that that is possible but I can’t figure out how to do it.

Is it possible to do this without doing what I’m currently doing–making the first instance bold and red, then eyeballing my way through the document and pasting that over every instance I see? If so, how?

I can’t upload a pdf so I’m uploading a jpg created from one of the pdfs. What I’m trying to do is change all the chords and their surrounding brackets from normal weight black to bold red. Much easier to see on my iPad that way.

(inline image display enabled by ajlittoz)

C:\fakepath\Rename to pdf before opening.jpg

Warning! Change extension to .pdf after downloading (comment added by ajlittoz).

Can you upload a sample PDF file here?

Why tagging base? Your question doesn’t seem to apply to a database.

Are you sure you are using writer? PDFs open in Draw because they can’t be edited as text document. They can only be marginally adjusted as graphics files.

Sorry about tagging the wrong thing. I’m brand new to LibreOffice and it’s different from the Mac software I’m used to.

I thought writer was what opened when I opened the pdf in LibreOffice because it gave me text editing options. I can change the font color and weight on whatever I select. But I just created a writer document and opened a PDF and I can see that the writer document gives me paragraph styles and things like that but the PDF does not. So I assume the PDF is open as a graphics file even though it sees and allows me to adjust text. That must be the marginal adjustment you were talking about. Which means I’ll have to find some other way of editing these documents.

Thanks for the help!

“I can’t upload a pdf so I’m uploading a jpg created from one of the pdfs.”

Sorry, I can not try to create a macro solution based on a image. This process needs need a real PDF file.

Do you want to change to bold+red all of the [x] type chord-characters in the document?

Because these characters are loceted inside a sentence, inside a graphical text object, it is not a simple task even with a macro solution…

Do you have the source ducument of the PDF files?
It would be so easier to edit the source document instead of the “electronically printed version”…

The colorizing maybe will give you an acceptable result, because the colorized letters have same size values than the black ones. But the bolded letters will be wider, and the text lines will be shifted by this reason, and - maybe - they will be overlapped in a PDF format document.

I do want to change the brackets and text inside the brackets to bold and red all through the documents.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the source documents. I emailed the organizer to see if he has any way to get a different format, but I think he gets these from sites that don’t offer many output format options.

So far, I’ve been okay with the boldface letters but it does depend on the font. I stick to some very basic fonts for that. Often Verdana. Sometimes Arial. I have noticed, though, that sometimes a different font is chosen and it does make the letters too wide to be easily readable. In that case, I change the font face in addition to the color and weight.

I can’t seem to upload a PDF to this forum. I could upload one to a google drive and share that, if that works.

“I can’t seem to upload a PDF to this forum. I could upload one to a google drive and share that, if that works.”

Edit your first post (the Question). There you can find the Attachment icon.

That’s how I uploaded the jpg of the pdf. When I tried to upload the pdf, I got a message listing the file types I could upload, which didn’t include pdfs.

@teryg93: outsmart the site engine

Change the PDF file extension (or add another extension) to .jpg and attach the fake JPEG file. Don’t forget to mention you did this trick so that contributor can apply the reverse mapping.

Done. (And thanks for the tip. I didn’t know you could do that.)

I had the idea to use a text editor to modify the PDF (after all PDF language is somewhat similar to PostScript) but Draw now encodes in PDF 1.6 which uses much more compression than your original PDF 1.3.

I looked then at Edit>Find & Replace in Draw because Draw can partially manage PDFs as graphics files. Contrary to Writer, Draw F&R does not allow to change formatting attributes, but it does allow to find all text patterns in the PDF.

So there is a partial solution to your problem.

Use Edit>Find or Ctrl+F to find the chord indications (F3 for “find next”) and patch manually formatting.

Take care that patches don’t cause overflow of text boxes beyond the right margin.

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Thanks. That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s painfully time consuming when I have over 200 files I want to do this with.