Re: [libreoffice-users] Bulk Changes

On 2025-04-10 13:49, Jonathan Allen wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm editing a book manuscript and need to make some bulk changes to
> the fonts and text sizes.  Typically ...
>
>    FrankRuel/14pt --> SBL Hebrew/12pt
>
> Is there a way on LO to simply have it make all those changes
> throughout the manuscript, or do I have to go through all 388 pages?
>
> Jonathan

You have been applying Paragraph Styles to the content of the book, 
right? If so, trivial--just edit the Paragraph style and change the 
font.

If not, you can select the entire document. Remove ALL direct 
formatting. Then work back through applying some mix of styles to the 
manuscript.

Alternatively, you can open the ODF Archive with a Zip program. Then 
open with an XML or simple text editor to review the Styles.xml and the 
Content.xml--identify the changes needed. Then use sed or python to 
change the Font assignment(s) in one or more passes through the XML. 
Then save the changed XML back into the Zip archive, and reopen in 
LibreOffice to see if any additional edits are needed. Of course, before 
an unzip to edit "externally" to LibreOffice, *make a copy* of the ODF 
so you can recover if you clobber it while figuring out the stream 
edits. Kind of a incremental trial and error approach to get it 
reformatted.

And then for next book, use styles when starting. Some great 
documentation for doing so in the Writer guide and the Byfield & Webber 
"Designing with LibreOffice" book [2], very worth a read. Easier to 
start off with and curate templates, than to direct format a long 
document and have to fight with formatting down the road.

[1] https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/
[2] https://designingwithlibreoffice.com/

Good luck.
--
Stuart

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