Is there any ay to find italics throughout a manuscript easily?
Answering this question requires more knowledge about your way of using Writer. However, since you want to find “italics”, I assume you use Writer just like a mechanical typewriter, i.e. you format everything manually.
Writer is intended to be driven by styles. A style is a collection of “geometric” properties (margins, indents, spacing, tabs, …) and typographical attributes (font face, size, weight, colour, language, …). You give this collection a name hinting at its usage, like Body Text, Heading 1, Footnote, Quotation, Emphasis, … Notice that these name don’t describe the look of the text but its significance.
This allows you to format Emphasis either as italic or red without to change the name of the style. This also allows to use the same typographical attribute for two different purpose while controlling them separately (e.g. italics may be used both for Emphasis and Foreign Word; but if you need to distinguish foreign words, you change the style and this will not affect emphasis).
Such a workflow can look in the beginning as a burden but it proves very powerful, efficient and effective. It even makes your question pointless because you no longer look for italics, you simply change the style configuration.
Going back to your question:
- open
Edit>Find & Replacedialog - press Format button
- in
Fonttab, select Italic from Style drop-down menu, OK - Find All
You can leave the dialog. All italic occurrences are now selected. Anything you type or any action will apply to the selection. You can apply a character style, another effect, …
I want to emphasise that direct formatting (the manual application of attributes) is not the “comfortable” way to work with elaborate text. You quickly meet difficulties due to the non centrally controlled formatting. Contrary to common belief, direct formatting is not intuitive at all and causes more issues and pain than a methodical management through styles.
PS: when asking here, always mention OS name, LO version and save format because of differences between platforms. The latter piece of information is crucial: most solutions given here are valid only for .odt save format. All other formats, notably .doc(x), are alien and need conversion/translation to internal ODF format with inherent loss of information.
Thanks for all this but I format books from other people’s manuscripts. I use LibreOffice as an ‘in-between’. The manuscripts are produced by different people using different software.
When I open up the ‘font’ tab it just gives me a list of fonts. Not the word ‘italic’.
The file is ODF format, what is OS and LO??
OS = operating system, aka. Window$, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, …
LO = LibreOffice
In the Font tab, below the font list, you have various drop-down menu. Style: is initially empty (void) because no font variant (italic, bold, …) is selected. Click there: this expands the menu to select from.
I wish you a lot of courage. Authors usually don’t care for reviewers. And even their creation process is a mess. I frequently wonder if their mind is clear. A clear mind should translate in a clear discourse, also in in its formatting structure.
What do you see if you click the drop down for typeface?
That’s it!! Thank you. How come I couldn’t find this??
You didn’t mention your LO version! As most users are not typography-aware, wording has progressively changed from typography-accurate terms to more common words, alas more ambiguous. In this case, I am not sure that Typeface is correct even in typography. In my understanding, a typeface is a particular design (shape)… I’d rather name “Menlo” or “Minion Pro” a face and Italic, Slanted, Bold, Medium, Heavy, … a “variant”.
Haha. I studied advanced typography many years ago and know what you mean. With italics, I have a lot of problems where people italicise words in a particular font rather than using the actual font. eg. Italicised Helvetica rather than Helvetica Italic.
Thanks again.