How to change font capitalization

[PaulaO]

I’m editing a manuscript that has already been published. The publisher’s standard was to make the first 3 words of each chapter all caps. Now that I am about to re-publish on my own, I’d like to remove that. However, the only thing I can find is under “font effects” or to erase and re-type. There’s no right click option to do this easily so I’ve just been backspace/retype.

Is there an easier way to do this? I remember some other software that had it as a right click menu > character > change capitalization.

[ajlittoz]

If our manuscript is fully styled, all you have to do is to change the character style for these initial words.

As an author, your text styling translate the significance and other effects of your text.

The main tool is paragraph styles. These classify paragraphs into “common” discourse, headings, comments, notes, citations, …

Inside paragraphs, you use character styles when there is a difference with the general paragraph semantics like emphasis, foreign word, irony, trade mark, dialogue, … In particular, you can have a specific character style for the first three words which are typed as using, without any specific case.

When it comes to formatting and lay out, you tune your styles without ever modifying your text. It can then have very different looks, only through style changes (margins, indents, vertical spacing, font face, size, weight, angle, color, casing, …).

If you followed this simple rule (full styling which separates contents from appearance), changing the full caps casing of the first three words is done by removing the Capitals or Small Capitals flag in the adequate character style Font Effects tab. In 10 seconds, your manuscript is updated.

If you didn’t style, you can’t but manually track the words and retype them.

To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!

[sveinki]

Instead of retyping it should be safer to select each beginning of chapter, choose “Format” → “Text” and then “Begin with a capital letter” (or something similar, I’m using a localized version of LO 7.1.5). But yeah, styles are the way to go…

[PaulaO]

Thanks to you both! Shooting an email to the editor to see if she uses styles. I know she has several macros she uses (ie I hit the space bar too hard and often end a paragraph with an extra space; she has a macro to fix that)

[PaulaO]

My editor says: “Let your editor remove them for you. She has a fancy Word tool.”

[ajlittoz]

Thanks for the feed back, but site rules say “Use Add Answer only for solutions”. All the rest should go to comments. So, please, move this non-answer to a comment and delete it.

Side remark: if your editor uses Word, your manuscript is likely to be saved .doc(x). And Word is far less advanced style-wise than Writer. Consequently, what I wrote about styles won’t apply because Word has no character styles.

If you’re on your own now, learn Writer styles (and save .odt otherwise you lose what you’ve done). They are really your friends and make many tasks honey-sweet.