Help with formatting a piece of text?

users
#1

I have a question on formatting a text multiple times in Writer. Here is my situation:

    I have a file which has a set of text like Date:<insert date here>
    seperated by new lines every time. There might be over 100's of
    these in the file, now I want to format them to Headings, would
    there be an easy way to do so without doing each and every single
    one of them by hand? I can try a Search and replace with Regexp but
    not sure if I will be able to just change the formatting, while also
    reverting to the original text.

Hope to hear soon,
A. M.

#2

There is. In the Find & Replace dialogue, put "&" in the "Replace with" box - to indicate that you want the string found to be put back in place. With the cursor in the "Replace with" box, click Format... (in the More Options area) and select the text format you wish to apply. Ideally, you ought to want to apply a character style instead, but I don't see any obvious way to do this.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#3

Thank you for your suggestion, it helped. Though I did it slightly different than what you suggested because "Format" does not set Paragraph Styles. Here's what I did - First I performed a regular expression search and selected "Find All" which selected all the Text which I wanted to format. Then in "More Options" I selected "Search for Paragraph Styles" and "Current Selection Only", and then changed the "Replace with" to "Heading 1", and then selected "Replace All".

Thank you for your help it was appreciated.

A. M.

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
Congrats on figuring it out and adapting Brian's advice until it did
work. Brian is usually precisely and exactly right so it's good to
see he's human too. Also thanks for posting the correct answer back
to the mailing-list so that people in the future have more hope of
finding the exact right answer! :slight_smile:

Nicely done! :slight_smile: Congrats and regards from
Tom :slight_smile: