Changing colour

Dai · Red Pill Joined: Feb 28, 2009 Posts: 6

I have worked on a large document (musical notatin in ABC form) and I want to change the colour for a series of symbols / //: (things like that) from black to grey. My question - is there a way of doing it for the whole document rather than having to change manually (I would have to make roughly 1500 changes)?
Thanks in advance.
Dai

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2009 9:51 am Post subject:

Note: I moved this to the "Support" forum.

I think that you may be able to do this with Find/Replace. If you go into Edit > Find and Replace, you should be able to insert your symbol into the "Search For" field. At the bottom you'll see a button called "More Options". Type your replacement text in the "Replace With" field, then select it and click that "More Options" button. That will reveal a "Format" button. Click that, and you will get the character formatting dialog where you should be able to specify the color for your replacement text.

ed

Dai · Red Pill Joined: Feb 28, 2009 Posts: 6

Hi One Step
Thanks for the prompt reply. I'm afraid it isn't changing the colour for me. It says that it has changed it but on printing and also on screen it hasn't changed it. I'm sure I'm doing something very simple wrong. Can you help anymore - step by step is good for - I'm not very compute literate and I confuse easily.
Dai

Dai · Red Pill Joined: Feb 28, 2009 Posts: 6

It seems to replace only some - say 4 instead of 35 of the symbols. Any reason for this do you think?
Working through it manually to get to the end of it through frustration.
Cheers
Colm

OPENSTEP · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 10:44 am Post subject:

OK, here's what I'm doing:

Open Edit > Find and Replace dialog
Enter text in "Find" field
Enter same text in "Replace" field
Click "More Options"
Click the newly revealed "Format" button
Go to the "Font Effects" tab
Choose color from the "Font Color" popup
Click "OK" to dismiss the formatting dialog
Click "Replace All" in the Find & Replace dialog

That should replace all of the text with the new formatting, at least it does for me.

ed

Lorinda · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2009 11:41 am Post subject:

If it's still only replacing some, there are at least two possibilities:

-the "Current Selection Only" box was checked (it should be unchecked if you want the entire document effect)

-you actually have two different characters in your document that look very similar.

Lorinda

Dai · Red Pill Joined: Feb 28, 2009 Posts: 6

No go I'm afraid.
I even highlighted the page I wanted to work on and I get 'search key not found' tab coming up. Manual is best I'm afraid.
Thanks to both of you for taking your time out to try to help me.
Dai

Lorinda · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 10:20 am Post subject:

if you are getting a "search key not found" error, then whatever you have typed in the find box is not actually the symbol used in the document. Either that, or "regular expressions" has been checked.

If you want to continue to pursue it, you might try copying the symbol in question from your document and pasting it in the 'find' and 'replace' boxes of the Find and Replace window.

Lorinda