Making my life easier

[rochvelleth]

You know what would make my life easier? If there was a way, in MS Word, of changing the main font used in a document to another font while leaving any other fonts used in the document as they are. So I have a document in Helvetica, but it's interspersed with odd references to Cypro-Minoan signs that need to use a different font[1]. I want to

Comments

[the_lady_lily]

I'd have thought you'd be able to do it with styles, which is a feature of MS Word 2007 - you'd need to set up a style to apply to all non-Cypro-Minoan content and then set up a style to apply to all Cypro-Minoan content, apply it as appropriate, and then change the non-Cypro-Minoan style to reflect the font change you wanted. Unfortunately, it's the kind of approach that works better if you've built the styles into the document from the beginning, but going through and assigning a Cypro-Minoan style to the relevant sections probably wouldn't be too much work.

[rochvelleth]

Ah, good thinking, thanks. Unfortunately this particular document has a switch to the CM font and back again in the middle of paragraphs, but this will come in handy for some of the other documents I'm working with.

[cartesiandaemon]

I'm sure it will be possible, but I'm not sure if it will be easy or very very fiddly...

[rochvelleth]

Yeah, I'm thinking it should be possible to tell the document somehow to convert all Helvetica into TNR, I just have no idea how. Maybe I should try Word's help facility just in case :)

[cartesiandaemon]

FWIW, my guesses would be (1) google for this exact question and see if anyone has a concise answer (2) examine the search dialog box, and see if it's possible to search for "text in font 1" and replace it with "text in font 2" (I don't know if Word can do this or not) (3) as lady lily says, word does have a concept of a default style for the document (and I think some styles can be switched mid-paragraph) but it involves understanding how styles work (which I don't)

[rochvelleth]

This sounds like a cunning plan to me :) I'll have a look around at some point.

I do think styles can be switched mid-paragraph, but I don't know of any way to do that other than to highlight a bit in the middle of a paragraph and change it. But then I might as well not bother with styles and just change the font :)

[ewx]

IIRC it's to some extent possible to select by font from the "fonts in use" panel, which might make it easier. I don't have a copy here to experiment with though.

[rochvelleth]

Ooh, thank you, I'll have a look for that.

[toothycat]

You can do search and replace formatting.

[rochvelleth]

Ah, thank you, that looks very useful!

[megamole]

Use styles.

[rochvelleth]

This seems to be the consensus :) I think I've been using it wrong.

[cartesiandaemon]

Uh, well, apparently so, yes, but the thing is, there's many concepts where simply knowing the name solves the problem because knowing what the term is, a quick google will give a simple guide, and maybe for you "using styles in word" is one of those, but weirdly it seems like for many intelligent people and for many technical people, styles is surprisingly non intuitive, so one kind of needs to explain WHAT to do with styles to make it work easily.

[rochvelleth]

It's surprising how much 'intuitive' varies, come to think of it :)