At 18:45 31/07/2016 -0400, Brian Meadows wrote:
I have a draft of a bridge (the card game) book to work on. My
co-author and I have decided to use the suit symbols where possible,
and I need to make that change retrospectively. I know how to
substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by
copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out
how to then switch back to black text after I've done the
substitution, if I change the text after the substituted symbol then
it comes out in red, which is NOT what I want.
It's standard behaviour in all word processors, I think, that any new
text typed in inherits its formatting from the immediately preceding text.
I tried adding a unique string in black after the symbol and then
substituting that out, nope, doesn't work, I still have the problem
that I seem to have switched to red text.
No, you simply have one red character and Writer assumes that you
would want anything following it also to be red. Imagine if this were
not the case: if you added a single character in some text, perhaps
to correct a spelling error, it would appear in some default format,
and you would have to go back and change it to a different font, font
size, bold, italic, whatever - like your existing formatted
surrounding text! No: this arrangement is generally helpful.
This would take me about two minutes in dear old Word Perfect, ...
That's because Word Perfect is both "dear" and "old" - in other
words, that you are familiar with it. It takes much less than two
minutes do something similar in OpenOffice - once you become familiar
with that too.
I've spent more than two hours trying to solve the problem in OO.
Can someone please save my remaining sanity and tell me how to do
this, I have a LOT of symbols to substitute, far too many to do them by hand.
You are seeing the problem as something different from what it is.
Replacing your original text with red symbols is the right thing to
do. You just need to find a way to add following text back in the
default colour afterwards. And you won't have "a lot" of occasions
where you need to do this - at least, not at once. Read on.
Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes'
option in Open Office where you can see all these things like font
changes etc. embedded in your document?
Yes and no. If you want to unpack the document file, the XML
description of your document is indeed a markup language, and you
could see something similar. But you would be very ill-advised to try
to tinker with them there. Messing with the "codes" in Word Perfect
was introduced to circumvent inefficiencies in the software, wasn't
it? The trouble is that users became happy with interfering under the
bonnet ("hood" if you are in that part of the world) and now don't
appreciate being able to do things properly through the normal
interface. So the short answer is "No": don't think of the problem that way.
Here are a few techniques:
o Is there generally a space after the symbol? Hopefully you won't
have made that space red as well. If you type your additional
material after that space, it will not become red.
o In any case, instead of typing immediately after your coloured
symbol, start one character to the right (or one word if you prefer),
retype that spare character at the end of your new text, and return
to delete the original single character afterwards.
o Just type away in red, select your new text, and use the Font
Colour drop-down in the Formatting toolbar to return the colour to
Automatic (or whatever).
A few thoughts:
o Are you sure that your book publisher will want to print hearts and
diamonds symbols in red in otherwise black text in your book?
o Are you sure, if your publisher will print these in red, that their
system will properly inherit the colours from your word processor
document? It is probably more likely that the book designer will
mandate that these symbols should be red (if that is the case) and
the compositor will follow that instruction. In that case, you do not
need your symbols to be coloured. At best, all you need is a note to
the publisher about your preference.
o You can probably make your life much easier by leaving the
substitution until you have finished the book text. Then you won't
need ever to insert text after your red symbols. Did your original
have "hearts" and "diamonds"? Why not leave these and replace them
once you have (more or less) finalised the text? Better still, why
not type codes - perhaps something like #h and #d? - and replace
these at the end? That way, there is less risk of your replacing the
small number of occurrences of the words that you probably need to
retain spelled out.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
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