Overtype in different colour

[robinm.nz]

I have a document with six light grey lines in monospace font as follows:
x|------------------|
(I’m trying to create an editable guitar TAB template if that’s any help)

I want to overtype individual hyphens with a number, bolded in a different color. I can change the font bold/color attribute and overtype one character, but subsequent to that the bold/color setting reverts to light grey. My goal is to change the font color once and replace multiple hyphens. This looks to be the same as the post ‘How to overtype using a different color font’, but the solution seems overly complex for what seems a simple task.

[Hrbrgr]

You should better work with styles. In this case you need character styles. For each character that should be different a character style.
In the character styles you define how the character(s) should look like.

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[Vanadium]

LO indeed does not work like that. It is an application to compose and edit text. When you switch to overtype mode, a character will replace the current character, retaining all its attributes. You have to explicitly change the appearance yourself.

I second that character styles could make this a lot easier. You can assign a character style to a shortcut key. Thus, you could select the entered text and apply the different formatting consistently with a single keystroke (or by double clicking on the character style).

[EarnestAl]

On a different tack entirely, have you looked this extension, ChordDiagrams » Extensions?