Description: We need a way to create a Find query in Writer that matches text that does *not* have an attribute. Eg "find a word in a font that is NOT Calibri". Or "find a character that is NOT highlighted in this yellow." Writer's support of regular expressions already makes Word look like a toy when working with very long texts. Going further, adding NOT could save many hours of manual searches that often miss occurrences. In the first example above, imagine you are finalising a 100,000-word text and you know there are odd words in the wrong font in random places. To make this worse, the wrong font may look almost identical to the correct one. There are multi-step workarounds, but they are time-consuming, unreliable and you usually have to drop what you are doing to implement them. Actual Results: NA Expected Results: NA Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: NA
I think that more than a NOT we need an OR... let me explain. If the text that's different was introduced by direct formatting, this is already possible *for single properties*: on the full search-replace tool (Ctrl-H) select "Attributes" and then activate, for example, "Font". Going back to the S&R tool, with the Find box empty click on "Search all:" every text with a font manually set and different from the base style will be highlighted. Now, I think an important limitation of this method comes if you are looking for a set of attributes that are not necessarily applied all at the same time. For instance, if you're looking for a different font OR a different font size: there you'll need to do one search at a time, which is time consuming. Right now, if you select two or more items on the Attributes dialog a strict "AND" is applied (the dialog search for all attributes appearing *at the same time* in the text), so maybe what's needed is to have an "OR" option (attribute 1 OR attribute 2)?
The Attributes would have saved me a lot of time, and just helped me find more irregularities. Thanks! The method should be flagged up more clearly. 'OR' makes sense but it doesn't help in this scenario: 'Find words in Font Calibri but NOT Size 11' Or more elaborate ones: 'Find words in (Size 11 or Size 10) but NOT (Font Calibri or Arial). I think theses are more straightforward, easier to understand logically, and don't presuppose styles discipline which man people don't have (and send us their texts). We might say the 2nd example is too elaborate for word processing, and that's fair enough. The main point is that in the 1st example, there is an implicit AND (ie 'but NOT' stands for 'AND NOT').