I have a roughly 300-page book written in Microsoft Word 2003, broken into about 25 chapters. I’ve decided that eight of the chapters need to have their text entirely italicized (they represent a special ongoing scene).
Unfortunately, the entire file contains numerous italicized words, and the eight chapters I want to completely italicize are no exception. Naturally, that means I need to UN-italicize the words that are currently italicized. But if I just select each chapter and click the Italic button (or hit Ctrl-I), it will italicize everything.
Select the chapter, do a find and replace, searching and replacing italic formatting for say, bold and bright pink formating. (You’ll maybe have to do it eight times for each chapter, selecting just the text in the chapter.)
With the chapter selected, change the formating to italics.
Then the words that were originally italic should now be italic, bold and pink.
Do a find and replace on everything that’s bold and pink and change it to your regular text, italic.
Control F, replace, more, format, text. There won’t be any words in your search box. That’s okay. Replace all.
Select chapter again, format italic.
Then find and replace and choose to replace your coloured bold with regular, black.
I just tried it in a piece of writing and it worked.
That’s a complicated way of explaining that I’d mark the italics with something distinctive that doesn’t change when you change the text to all italic, so you find your original italics and un-italic them with a find-and-replace. Some people don’t realise that find-and-replace will find formatting, paragraph marks and stuff as well as characters.
Thanks Savannah – I figured out a way of doing it that’s almost exactly what you said and I did four of the eight chapters so far, but your suggestion is slightly faster to set up and will help me a lot for the future. Here’s what I did:
I did end up doing a find-and-replace (Ctrl-h). What I did was select the text for each chapter, then do find-and-replace, then select “Use Wildcards.” Then in the “Find what:” box I put “(?)” (without the quotes, of course) and set More … Format … Font … Italic. Then in the “Replace with” box I put “\1” (again, without the quotes) and set Format … Font … Bold Italic. This searched for every italicized character (the question mark) and makes it referenceable as a specific token in the Replace with box (that’s what putting it in parentheses does, evidently). The \1 in the Replace with box means “Replace with the first token from the Find what box.” So every italicized letter in the selected text was replaced with a bold italic letter.
Then, I left the find-and-replace box, hit Ctrl-I to italicize the entire selection (unless the very first words was italicized – then I had to hit Ctrl-I twice because the first Ctrl-I would UN-italicize the whole selection), and then went back into the find-and-replace box. I left Find what as (*) and Replace with as \1, but changed the formatting for Find what to Bold Italic and changed the formatting for Replace with to Regular (which shows up as Format: Not Bold, Not Italic in the find-and-replace window). So each character that was bold and italic was replaced with a regular non-bold, non-italic character.
But from your post, I gather that I didn’t have to go through the whole wildcard thing, using (*) and \1. Instead, if I just leave it blank, it will simply search for those formats and replace them. Handy! I was unaware of that, but it’ll be nice to know in the future.
However, I’m still glad I figured out the whole find-and-replace wildcards and tokens thing, because I’ve been looking for a way to use those tokens for a while. Now, for instance, if I decide to change my chapter headers from “Chapter (number)” to just numbers, I can just do a find-and-replace of (Chapter )(^#) with \2. (Of course, I guess that will only work with chapters 1-9, and I’ll have to replace (Chapter )(^#^#) with \2 for the two-digit chapters. Too bad there’s no “any number” code to complement the “any digit” code …
I did not know that. I sort of collect Word tidbits - they come in handy working with patrons. (Had one yesterday that needed to change a resume template. God, do I hate that.)
Um, if you’re going to open each file anyway, why not just manually delete the "Chapter " at the beginning of the file, instead of fooling around with wildcards?
BTW, the wildcard combo for “any combination of one or two digits” is [0-9]{1, 2}. The search character for any single digit is ^#.
If you want to learn scads of things about wildcards and other groovy Word stuff, go to www.editorium.com. You can browse the newsletter archives for tons of free info. Jack Lyon (Editorium owner) also sells template/macro suites (45 days free trial), but he has several freebies too. I am constantly consulting his “Total Word Domination” e-book, a steal at $7.95, but (I think) it’s really just a compilation of Editorium articles. The free newsletter alone is a gold mine. Usual disclaimers, just a very satisfied customer.
They’re not separate files – all the chapters are in one big file. Thus making it much easier to just search and replace.
Wow, that’s awesome. Thanks for the tip about the site and the e-book, and thanks for the tip about the digits – I didn’t realize you could specify quantities too. That makes it even more useful. Now I wonder if there’s a way to generate leading zeroes too, so that, for instance, all my numbers are two digits. Maybe I can find out at the Editorium.
Just beware the global search and replace; you’ll want to approve each change, and possibly precede your search term with ^013 (paragraph mark) or whatever the code is for a page break, depending on how your file is formatted, to (1) avoid deleting inline references such as “In Chapter 6 we learned that . . .” and (2) reduce the number of hits by finding only the word “Chapter” (match case) preceded by a paragraph mark/page break.