How to replace text with font style/color "italic red" to one of my created Character Styles?

BrentGG · April 30, 2025, 2:00pm

[LO Writer 7.4.7.2 Win64]
I wrote a long ODT document and used Italic Red font attribute to mark up some of the text. Since then I switched the document to using character styles which works great! However I now need to replace the old Italic Red font attributes applied to some of the text over to the new Character Style. Is this possible? If not, it will take me days to do it manually.

TIA

ajlittoz · April 30, 2025, 2:40pm

Edit>Find & Replace
Click Format
- In Font tab, select Style: Italic
- in Font Effects (if this is character colour) or Highlighting (if this is background colour), select your colour from the palette
Find All in the main F&R dialog
This will select all occurrences. Check anyway there are no false-positives.
You can close the F&R dialog or push the window aside
Double-click on your character style in the side style pane
Ctl+M to clear your coloured direct formatting

You can now click anywhere to cancel the multiple selection created by F&R.

Caution: F&R seems to be very picky about formatting attributes selection. You may need several attempts to get it right.

Zizi64 · April 30, 2025, 4:22pm

Important addition for ajlittoz’s list:

Create the desired character style. Use the Parent: “No character style” option when you want modify only that two parameters but not the other parameters of the applied paragraph style.

Here is a sample file. One highlighting character style for more than one different paragraph styles:

One_Highlighting_CharacterStyle_For_MoreThanOne_Paragraph_Styles.odt (56.1 KB)

BrentGG · May 2, 2025, 6:09am

Thanks very much for your help ajlittoz, and Zizi64’s help as well. I spent the day playing with your technique and it is of immense help. I will look at Zizi64’s updated post tomorrow for more inspiration. I have several font styles to convert over to character styles in a large document.

BrentGG · May 5, 2025, 3:27pm

This was a learning experiments for me. From now on if I am writing a document of more 10 pages, I will force myself to use character styles and paragraph styles and not take the easy way out and use font styles in the text.

For future documents, I’ve created a SampleStyles.ODT file that contains text with all of the standard styles that I would use in a document. I can easily copy and paste it to the end of a new document and references those character styles or paragraph styles in the new document. Then when the new document is finished, I simply delete the sample text.

ajlittoz · May 5, 2025, 4:58pm

There is a much more elegant and handy way. Turn your sample document into a template (.ott file extension) with File>Templates>Save as Template.

Simply create the styles, no need to have examples.

You can also type initial text in the template. This text is part of the document created from the template. It may be a full skeleton or constant data present in every document.

Once you template is saved with the command above (there are a few additional details, see the help or manual), you create your derived documents with File>New>Templates.