How do I remove all fonts from book and start over?

[bpaddock]

I have a 350 page book that I’ve been self publishing via Create Space.
An actual publisher has taken interest in the book.
However they tell me that I need to clean up the inconsistency in the fonts.
Their trained eye sees the difference between Serif and San Serif for one of many examples.
Too my untrained eye the font could be Wet Dog and I’d probably not notice.

So I want remove all fonts that have accumulated over time and in part conversion from Word, along with removing their proprietary fonts, then start with a single base font and move on from there.

How do I get back to a single base font (would like to have the old dead fonts gone from the file as well)?

Thank you for your help.

[Grantler]

Save as txt file and then start formatting anew. If there are footnotes or special headlines it will be more complicated, I assume.

Don’t apply direct formatting but styles.

[ajlittoz]

@Grantler’s advice is radical and should be considered as a last resort because you’ll lose notes, cross-references, tables, frames, pictures, indexes, … with the risk of introducing carriage-returns at end of every line causing them to become afterwards paragraphs.

The favorable case is your document is thoroughly styled. In this circumstance, all you have to do is review your styles. Take special care on possible manual direct formatting which may hide your changes.

The case were your document is exclusively direct formatted is not so bad. Define first a set of styles: paragraph styles for general aspect of paragraphs (content, titles, outline, …) and character styles for the intra-paragraph variants. Don’t forget page styles if needed (cover pages, ToC, indexes, chapter and possible first chapter pages). Then keep a copy of your book so that you can display side by side the original and updated versions. In the updated copy, select all text (Ctrl+A) and clear direct formatting (Ctrl+M). Now, apply a paragraph style paragraph after paragraph. When some words inside a paragraph need highlighting of some sort, apply a character style to them.

The worst case is when you have a mixture of styling and direct formatting. It is likely then that your styles are not consistent. You can’t rely on them to elaborate a new set. Make an unformatted copy as previously and try to infer the needed styles. Always compare copies when proof-reading.

The task is tedious, there is no way out but it is an immense opportunity to discover the power of styles. To cheer you up, a personal note: many years ago, I was under a deadline to write a technical notice (which ended up in the 150-200 pages range) and it was my first contact with a document processor. I took the time to study the available features to see how to tackle the task in a reasonable amount of time. It was in fact an upgrade from a document composed on a mainframe, using macros to typeset text (something in the spirit of LaTex). Cute styling allowed me to achieve the job in 15 work days.

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[HenkC.Meerhof]

ajlittoz has a workable approach. In case of inconsistent use of styles you just select all and use the default paragraph style. From here you can style the document using standard or your own styles. Please consult your publisher on style naming. A safe way is to use HTML-tag names like H1 for headers of the highest order. H2 of the second order and so one.