Searching/replacing formatting

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Searching/replacing formatting

The ribbon commands Home | Search and Home | Replace allow you to search for formatting as well as text – and even to replace the specified formatting with other formatting as required.

You can thus replace a specific font that occurs repeatedly in the text with another font, for example.

To search for formatting, proceed as follows:

1.Choose the ribbon command Home | Search search_icon.
2.If the Format button is not displayed in the dialog, click on the Enlarge button to expand the search dialog.
3.Delete any previous search term in the Search for field by clicking on the Reset button.
4.Click on the Format button.
5.Select the type of formatting for which you want to search: character formatting, paragraph formatting, character styles or paragraph styles.
6.The program opens a dialog box in which you specify the formatting for which you want to search. Then confirm with OK.
7.You can now start the search by clicking on the Search button.

To search for formatting and replace it with other formatting, proceed as follows:

1.Choose the ribbon command Home | Replace replace_icon.
2.Use the Format button to specify the formatting for which you want to search (see above) and then confirm with OK.
3.Click in the input field Replace with.
4.Use the Format button again to specify the formatting that is to replace the formatting specified above as the search term. Confirm with OK again.
5.You can now start the search with the Search button.

When TextMaker finds an occurrence of the search term, it displays the occurrence in the document.

To continue searching, click on the Search again button. Alternatively, if you want to replace the formatting, click on the Replace button. If you click on Replace all, TextMaker will replace all occurrences of the formatting you are searching for in the text with the new formatting.

Tip: You can use this function, for example, to replace one font with another throughout the document. However, experts would use styles in this case (see Styles) because they provide a much more elegant means of performing this task. If you change the font in a style, all sections of text that are formatted with this style are automatically changed accordingly.

By the way, searching for text and formatting can also be combined. Thus you can search for a specific search term with a specific formatting. For example, if you enter "TextMaker" as the search term and also specify bold character formatting for the search, the search will find every occurrence of "TextMaker" in bold characters in the document.