I have finished a lengthy essai and all of my notes (more than 200) have the bibliographical references in bold. It is the same for the bibliography at the end of said essai.
What i want to do is to turn all of the bold writings into italic writings, I am not familiar at all with styles features.
I am finished with zotero so there will not be any overwriting issues.
i am using a computer running windows
Please improve your question by editing it (= modify it, don’t use a comment). Describe your environment first (OS name, LO version and save format). Tell us if you are familiar with styles (or if otherwise you format manually everything).
Are your bold characters located in Zotero generated text?
From a general point of view, it is easy to change any formatting if it is controlled by a style (paragraph, character, page, …).
Zotero is a portable citation management system which is not integrated with LO (or any other suite). It acts as an external layer over the document. It is implemented as a collection of macros which are triggered by various events. Consequently if your “bold characters” are generated by Zotero, any later triggering will reset your changed characters to bold. So describe as accurately as possible your goal.
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I understand from your question update you’re quite a newbie with document processing. I assume that you format manually everything.
To make things worse, what you want to modify is managed by Zotero. So, any attempt to apply style or otherwise to modify appearance with manual formatting will be overwritten by Zotero. You say you have finished writing your document, manual changes may then perhaps survive.
Another angle of attack would be to customise Zotero configuration if this is possible. Unfortunately I am not familiar with Zotero and can’t help in this area. You could perhaps ask Zotero developers or see if there is a Zotero-dedicated forums.
… mostly elaborating on what @ajlittoz already said in the comments …
I did some work towards Zotero/Writer and citation styles in the past (years ago). Based on memories from that (Unable to test right now. Conflicting LO/Java/Zotero “bitness” which does not resolve easily, so the Zotero part is only from memory. Sorry!) …
The formatting Zotero employs to citations/bibliography is an inherent component of the chosen citation style. See Zotero citation styles for more info.
Zotero’s styling is applied by way of direct formatting (which @ajlittoz specifically mentions).
I can see two viable paths:
Quick-and-dirty: Find all bold text and alter formatting to italic/unbold.
Clean but involved: Edit the chosen citation style (or better, create a new one by copying the currently used citation style) to apply formatting as desired.
Quick-and-dirty
Note that this catches all directly formatted bold text, so it may alter more than you want. If Zotero now (or some time) employs named styles, this is the wrong way to go about it. Such style should be editable in your document, and hopefully not reset when you update citations/bibliography.
- Select menu item Edit - Find and replace …
- Expand Options and click the Format … button
- Click the Font tab
- In the Style dropdown, select Bold.
- OK
- Find all
- Click toolbar icons B to disable bolding and I to enable italic.
- Close the find/replace dialog.
Clean but involved
Edit the citation style definition to suit your needs. The definitions syntax is a bit daunting, but this way you avoid “catching too much”, and also you avoid any reset caused by refreshing the citations.
You have to look for documentation and other guidance on citation styles on the Zotero pages. See the link provided above. Good luck!
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