How to find places where Custom Paragraph Styles are used in a document

English
, , , ,
#1

Over time I’ve created, and forgotten about, Custom Paragraph Styles I’ve created for a book I wrote. Now I want to purge the document of all custom styles that I never used, but I haven’t found a way to locate them, without a tedious perusal of over 330 pages!

Also, now that I’ve finished my book, I want to make sure all the fonts I used are Public Domain, which means going through each Custom Style [there are many], and finding where each is being used, so, if the font needs to be changed, I can make a gratifying substitution. Hence my interest in purging unused custom styles.

Does anyone know of a way to search based on Paragraph Style [“Page Style” is in the list of Search-And-Replace Attributes, but not Paragraph Style — which seems odd to me], or some other way to make this association?

Otherwise I’ll fall back on my “plan B” and save the thing in XML, and search that :roll_eyes:

#2

I just answered part my own question! At the bottom of the Styles Manager is a filtering device. Setting it to Applied Styles at least shows me what styles are in use, in my document. But, I still need a way to find places, within the document, where each style is being used.

Too bad there isn’t an Unused Custom Styles filter … or is there?

#3

Set different font/highlight colors to each applied style.

1 Like
#4

Clever! I’ll give it a try!

#12

Very clever. Unfortunately, this no longer works in 25.8.0.4. In fact, many Attributes are now not searchable. About the only thing you can do is edit the style, set a highlight color, and search for the attribute “character highlight color”.

#13

@andrewgjennings
Have you looked at Spotlight? When you activate it (you can do separately for paragraph, character styles and, most informative, for direct formatting), your document is painted with various colours (and a number). This colour is echoed in the side style pane so that you can visually identify which style is applied.

1 Like
#14

https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide/spotlight_styles.html?DbPAR=WRITER#bm_id401688481259265

#8

Well, I found my own solution [finally!]. It’s an old LibreOffice extension:

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer

I was dubious because it appears development/maintenance ceased after “Compatibility 3.3”, but so far only one issue, and that was likely operator error exposing a bug. It was easy to recover from, and hasn’t happened since. What has happened is a whole lot of happy searching on Paragraph Styles! Thus problem solved!

UPDATE: I missed the solution posted by @Wanderer until after I posted this. So I marked it the solution [instead] because it’s germane [see what I did there :wink: ] and doesn’t require the installation of an extension. But, heck, I really like the extension!

#5

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/1983

#9

How does an extension for selecting “special cells” in Calc, help me with searches in Writer?

#6

I just tested under LO 6.4.7.2 with Win10:
I have in “Search and Replace” Alt-Ctrl-F a checkbox, visible, if you open Options wich is labeled “Absatzvorlagen” in my german locale.
Selecting this I can select my defined paragraph-styles añd cycle through them by using the search-next button.

#11

Google translates Absatzvorlagen to: “Paragraph templates”. And, on my version of Writer [7.1.5.2 (x64)] Find and Replace is Ctrl-H [Alt-Ctrl-F isn’t].
But, yes, under Other Options I see the Paragraph Styles checkbox. I completely missed that, so thanks!

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.