Bug 106730 - Searching for Character Formatting is Broken
Summary: Searching for Character Formatting is Broken
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
5.3.1.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: bibisectRequest, regression
Depends on:
Blocks: Find-Search Find&Replace-Styles
  Show dependency tree / graph
 
Reported: 2017-03-23 20:30 UTC by vermontpoet
Modified: 2019-06-19 14:11 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:

Attachments
Alternating hard/soft formatting... (11.46 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2017-10-30 12:35 UTC, vermontpoet 		Details
Document to reproduce the bug (27.47 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2018-06-16 21:35 UTC, Phil Krylov 		Details
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Description vermontpoet 2017-03-23 20:30:44 UTC 
Description:
Searching for direct formatting like bold and italics simply doesn't work. Words and/or swathes of text are highlighted in the search results that have nothing to do with the search terms. This makes it impossible, for example, to replace a directly formatted BOLD character with soft-formatting (character styles instead of direct formatting). I can produce this Bug on both my Linux and Windows installation of LO.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Search for Bold or Italics (Hard-Formatting)

Actual Results:  
Chaotic. Highlight words and text that have nothing to do with search term.

Expected Results:
If I search for Italics, for example, LO should highlight all italicized words or text strings. 

This is basic and essential functionality that works on every other word processor I use: Word and Softmaker Office among others.


Reproducible: Always

User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Comment 1 LibreTraining 2017-03-23 21:36:17 UTC 
Related
Bug 106556 - Add functionality that highlights all directly formatted text

In that thread I attached three screenshots:
- Word - Show Direct Formatting Guides
- Adobe InDesign - Find - Select Direct Formatting Characteristics
- Adobe InDesign - Replace - Select Character Style

Being able to see the direct formatting is needed.

Being able to find and replace the direct formatting is needed.
Comment 2 vermontpoet 2017-03-24 12:50:42 UTC 
Just wanted to add (or forgot to mention) that the search feature in LO is itself flaky. Working on an 800 page document. Sometimes LO finds text that I know is there, sometimes it doesn't. (Writing for Ebooks, I haven't been inserting chapter markers, but relay on search to navigate the document.)
Comment 3 Xisco Faulí 2017-03-28 07:34:41 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 4 QA Administrators 2017-10-30 10:54:33 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 5 vermontpoet 2017-10-30 12:35:00 UTC 
Created attachment 137369 [details]
Alternating hard/soft formatting...

Attached a sample document. Am unable to search for character styles. LO doesn't have the ability to discriminate between hard formatting and character styles in its search functionality. 

And cannot replace one with the other.

To be honest, I quit using LO about a year ago due to very basic issues like these---issues which developers (see my other Bug Reports) have either flatly stated they're not interested in fixing or features they resist or refuse to implement (involving style functionality in LO).

Am now using Textmaker. Does everything I ask. Works beautifully for writing ebooks (makes extensive use of paragraph and character styles easy).

If and when LO brings its "style" capabilities into the 21rst century, I'd love to use it again...
Comment 6 Phil Krylov 2018-04-05 14:17:38 UTC 
As of version 6.0.3.2, searching for direct character formatting seems to work fairly well. The rest of the OP's problem is probably related to lack of support for character style F&R (bug 78582).
Comment 7 Phil Krylov 2018-06-16 21:22:25 UTC 
Confirming that searching for direct character formatting is still working in:

Version: 6.0.4.2
Build ID: 9b0d9b32d5dcda91d2f1a96dc04c645c450872bf
CPU threads: 4; OS: Mac OS X 10.9.5; UI render: default; 
Locale: en-US (en.UTF-8); Calc: group

However, it is totally broken in a recent master build:

Version: 6.2.0.0.alpha0+
Build ID: b292a27698e85fd9d60c03613c3b0c67835c4dc1
CPU threads: 4; OS: Mac OS X 10.9.5; UI render: default; 
TinderBox: MacOSX-x86_64@49-TDF, Branch:master, Time: 2018-06-06_23:25:55
Locale: en-US (en.UTF-8); Calc: group threaded

First of all, the dialog for choosing character formatting to search for has changed, and now it's impossible to select just a font face without setting a specific size, sets it to 0 pt by default. Next, even if you choose some specific size, Writer continuously "finds" every paragraph in text although they are typeset in another font.
Comment 8 Phil Krylov 2018-06-16 21:35:48 UTC 
Created attachment 142808 [details]
Document to reproduce the bug
Comment 9 Phil Krylov 2018-06-16 21:39:19 UTC 
Steps to reproduce:

1. Open attachment 142808 [details].
2. Edit - Find & Replace - Format - Monomakh Unicode TT - 12 pt - OK - Find Next.

Writer finds random strings which are not typeset with the chosen font. I could not reproduce that behaviour with a shorter document.
Comment 10 QA Administrators 2019-06-19 02:48:00 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 11 Phil Krylov 2019-06-19 14:11:14 UTC 
Could not reproduce the problem in:

Version: 6.3.0.0.beta1
Build ID: a187af327633f5f00363be5131bd21a13e0f1a7b
CPU threads: 4; OS: Mac OS X 10.13.6; UI render: default; VCL: osx; 
Locale: en-US (en_RU.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-US
Calc: threaded