I can Find (select) the letters I want to capitalize, using
: [a-z]
(selects all the letters after a colon and a space)
But when I do Format > Font > Uppercase (also tried with Capitalize Every Letter) and apply that, it does capitalize them, but when I try to cut and paste them outside of Writer, what pastes is still lowercase. (I’ve tried saving and reopening etc.
Debian Linux and LO 7.4.1.1 (saving as .odt)
Sort of a bump. So there’s no way to actually do this on Writer? (actually change letters to uppercase, as opposed to just displaying them as uppercase).
I perhaps caused a confusion with my answer. See my edit.
Format>Text>casing options => hard change to documentFont Effects of a style => only rendering affectedYou’re right. Top menu > Format > Text > Uppercase works.
When asking here, always mention OS name, LO version and save format. This gives cues for adapted answers.
When you apply Format>Font>xxx to some sequence, you add metadata to your text without modifying it. This metadata tells Writer to render text in a specific manner.
Note that you applied it manually, called direct formatting in Writer. Though it may look “easy” to do so, this is only a means to discover which kind of variant may be applied to text and to experiment. The more professional approach is to use styles. This allows you to control centrally the appearance of your document without the need to hunt for all your direct formatting. It is much more powerful and versatile.
When you copy a sequence, the full sequence and its metadata is transferred to the clipboard. If you paste outside of Writer, it all depends on which kind of format the external application understands. If ODF (the LO standardised format) is totally alien to this application, it falls back to the “simple text” version which is also stored in the clipboard. This simple text is made of the characters with all metadata stripped off.
As I mentioned above, applying a format does not change the text (and this is great because you can change for another “look” without needing to modify text). Consequently, the raw initial text sequence is pasted.
EDIT 2022-12-20
Format>Text>UPPERCASE and the like don’t apply a format but change text casing. It is not the same as applying a style. Use it if you want to really change document casing.
Right, makes sense. I would rather use a Find and Replace than format for this task, but haven’t yet found that. I’ll update my post to say I’m using Debian Linux and LO 7.4.1.1 (saving as .odt)
It all depends on what you want/need to do with your text.
BTW:
If this is about a part of a text otherwise not depending on internally different formating, there is a workaround. The reduced text service available for text in shapes does not support the feature of superimposed "pretended letter case ". On the other hand it “knows” about it, and converts pretended case to actual case…
Create a sufficiently large TextBox shape (from the drawings toolbar) and paste your processed text in.
If you now copy the text from inside the shape, and paste it into (say) Notepad, you may get what you need, If formatting isn’t an isue now, you can copy/paste the resulktuing text back.
Next BTW: I would prefer the RegEx (?<=: )[a-z]. There will not be an attempt then to casechange the colon e.g. If you want to restrict the findings to lower case you can even prefix a (?-i) to switch off case insensitivity.
Note: The also simplified text service supported by Calc cells does not apply the conversion. There you get the respective characters in lowe case.
Also note: It’s not actually difficult to do what you want with some lines of user code.
So when I use the command Format - Text - Uppercase in LO 7.0.4.2 in Debian, LO converts the text to uppercase. This is not direct formatting or a style sheet. Copying and pasting in other applications keeps the capital letters.
You’re right, apologies. Since I always use styles, I was thinking of the Font Effects tab and its possibilities. Styling doesn’t change text while Format>Text>… does.
This reminds me of a comment I had written earlier and then aborted due to the wonderful reply by @ajlittoz. I had advised to use that menu path after having called FindAll in F&R, and having given the focus back to the main frame (title bar) of the document. In fact you should prefer this over the above described workaround.
Anyway it’s interesting what strange ways development goes when forced by compatibility reasons (WYSIWYGism ?).
BTW: To put the means actually converting the characters under the menu item Format should be treated as a criminal offense. How should any intelligent user learn about correct usage if being mislead all the time.