Searching for hidden text

[avidscavenger]

This question has been asked before (How can I search on the hidden text attribute?), but the accepted answer is not satisfactory as I explain below.

LibreOffice’s search/replace functions appear not to offer any way of searching on the ‘Hidden’ character effect. This seems to be a basic omission, as it does allow searching on the other effects: Case, Relief, Outline and Shadow.

The accepted answer of using the Alternative Find & Replace extension does not work. The extension is unmaintained for the last 3 years. With LibreOffice 7 it spuriously deletes characters at the cursor, and more significantly fails to search on the CharHidden property only. That is, if I ask it to search for a specific hidden character then it works, but asking to to search for any hidden character does not.

Does anyone have a better solution?

[UPDATE in response to @ajlittoz]

My use case is that I have a series of RTF documents from a third party source that for no obvious reason contain small amounts of hidden text that is obviously redundant. I need to convert these files to other formats including text for the purpose of further processing. For that purpose I am using unoconv and LibreOffice - there are alternatives for converting to text but not (AFAICT) for converting to other formats. If I convert to ODT or DOC then the hidden characters remain hidden and don’t present a problem. But when I convert to text they stop being hidden and start to cause problems.

So, long story short, I don’t want to see the hidden text, I just want to get rid of it.

[ajlittoz]

For a better solution, explain your use case of Hidden attribute. If your goal is only to find where you have hidden text, make sure you have configured Tools>Options, LibreOffice Writer>Formatting Aids to display hidden text. Enable then View>Formatting Marks.

[ajlittoz]

Quite a long time since I fiddled with RTF. A better angle of attack would be to consider how RTF marks up hidden text. You can then script a text editor to remove the markup and associated text (from opening tag to closing tag). Seams to me this could be easier and driven from a shell script.

Once you have a clean RTF source, you can use Writer to convert to other formats.

[LeroyG]

A workaround for hidden paragraphs (not consistent for parts of paragraphs):

By some (strange) reason, when text is selected in Block mode (Block selection), hidden paragraphs are not selected.

So you can:

1. Activate Block selection in the Status bar , and select all text holding Shift and using the movement keys (in the longest line, press End and Down Arrow), release Shift¹
2. Apply a font effect not used in the text (e.g. Strikethrough, not all font effects work here)
3. Unselect text (Esc), and select all again in Standard selection mode (Ctrl+A)
4. Choose menu Format - Character… - Font Effects tab, unmark Hidden, OK
5. In the Find & Replace dialog, Format… button - Font Effects tab - Strikethroughvalue set to (Without) - OK - Find All button - Close button
6. Delete (you will get a empty paragraph for each one deleted)
7. Select all text and reverse Strikethrough

¹ The same result is achieved holding Alt while selecting with the mouse.

Tested with LibreOffice 6.4.7.2 (x86); OS: Windows 6.1.

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