[JBM7NVL]

I'm writing a novel and I used apostrophes to show thought. After writing
further on, I strayed from apostrophes and simply decided to write the text
in italicized. This proved to be very troublesome upon reaching the end,
realizing that over the first half of my book has apostrophes. Can someone
help me delete and replace all of the apostrophes to just italicized
thoughts.

[Jay Freedman]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:45:05 -0800, JBM7NVL
wrote:

I'm writing a novel and I used apostrophes to show thought. After writing
further on, I strayed from apostrophes and simply decided to write the text
in italicized. This proved to be very troublesome upon reaching the end,
realizing that over the first half of my book has apostrophes. Can someone
help me delete and replace all of the apostrophes to just italicized
thoughts.

You need to use a "wildcard" Replace
(http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm).

First, make a copy of the document and work on that, keeping the
original untouched in case you need to start over.

Next, do a regular (non-wildcard) Replace using the Find Next and
Replace buttons to find any apostrophes that were used for possessives
or other non-quote purposes and change them to some unique character
such as the pipe (|) character. That will prevent the next step from
italicizing the wrong text.

In the Replace dialog, click the More button to open the bottom half
of the dialog. Check the box for "Use wildcards".

In the Find What box, enter the expression

'(*)'

which represents any text surrounded by apostrophes.

In the Replace With box, enter the expression

\1

which represents the text that matched the (*) in the Find What
expression -- that is, the text between but not including the
apostrophes. While the cursor is still in that box, press the Ctrl+I
shortcut to set the replacement formatting to italic.

Click the Replace All button. That should do all the necessary
replacements. You need to page through and check the result, though --
if you missed any unmatched apostrophes, some of the wrong text will
be italicized.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit.

[Jay Freedman]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:20:52 -0500, Jay Freedman
wrote:

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:45:05 -0800, JBM7NVL
wrote:

I'm writing a novel and I used apostrophes to show thought. After writing
further on, I strayed from apostrophes and simply decided to write the text
in italicized. This proved to be very troublesome upon reaching the end,
realizing that over the first half of my book has apostrophes. Can someone
help me delete and replace all of the apostrophes to just italicized
thoughts.

You need to use a "wildcard" Replace
(http://www.gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm).

First, make a copy of the document and work on that, keeping the
original untouched in case you need to start over.

Next, do a regular (non-wildcard) Replace using the Find Next and
Replace buttons to find any apostrophes that were used for possessives
or other non-quote purposes and change them to some unique character
such as the pipe (|) character. That will prevent the next step from
italicizing the wrong text.

In the Replace dialog, click the More button to open the bottom half
of the dialog. Check the box for "Use wildcards".

In the Find What box, enter the expression

'(*)'

which represents any text surrounded by apostrophes.

In the Replace With box, enter the expression

\1

which represents the text that matched the (*) in the Find What
expression -- that is, the text between but not including the
apostrophes. While the cursor is still in that box, press the Ctrl+I
shortcut to set the replacement formatting to italic.

Click the Replace All button. That should do all the necessary
replacements. You need to page through and check the result, though --
if you missed any unmatched apostrophes, some of the wrong text will
be italicized.

Oh, one more step: Use a non-wildcard Replace to change the pipe
characters (or whatever else you used to represent the "real"
apostrophes) back to apostrophes.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit.