How do I Find and Replace w Bold?

The following AppleScript will prompt you for a search word, and then will bold it in that specific font wherever it is found in the body text of the document. Optionally, it will also set that word to a highlightColor if set, otherwise that will be ignored.

The original idea and script for this was originated by SGIII and I have modified it somewhat for this bold font specificity. Copy/paste into Script Editor, click compile, and run with an opened Pages document. You can also save this to the Desktop as a script, script bundle, or application.

set highlightColor to "blue"
set txtFormat to "Bold"
set matchCnt to (0 as integer)
set app_icon to "/Applications/Pages.app/Contents/Resources/AppIcon.icns"

use scripting additions

set searchWord to text returned of ¬
	(display dialog "Highlight what word?" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "Continue"} default button "Continue")

tell application "Pages"
	tell document 1's body text
		
		repeat with aword in (words where it is searchWord)
			
			tell application "Font Book"
				set ffnames to name of (font family (font of aword))'s typefaces
			end tell
			set font_name to (aword's font & space & txtFormat)
			if ffnames contains font_name then
				-- failure is tolerated if missing font_name or highlightColor
				try
					set aword's font to font_name
					set aword's color to highlightColor
				end try
				set matchCnt to matchCnt + 1
			end if
		end repeat
		
	end tell
end tell
display dialog "Find/Replace is complete." & return & return & "Search: " & searchWord & return & "Replacements: " & (matchCnt as text) buttons {"Done"} default button "Done" with title "Find/Replace Facility" with icon POSIX file app_icon as alias
return

Caveats:

1. Not all fonts have "Name Bold" for bold font names, so script will not set any with hyphenated or abbreviated font names.
2. Inspecting every word in the document to get a list of matches so it runs proportionately slower with larger documents.

Find/Replace will replace content, but not format. Text (word) is content; bold is format, applied to that content.

AppleScript can replace content, and can apply format to that content. Details will have to come from one of the scripters participating in this community.

Regards,

Barry

Just one more thing you could do with Pages 4 & earlier that is not possible post-2013.

Do you know that Apple actually contacted me and wanted me to work w the Pages Team on resolving the issue.

The trouble in the mean time, I don't know how, I don't know if I had updated to 7.3, or what, but the issue disappeared. So I regrettably wrote back to Apple, I was sorry and happy, but the issue has resolved, and thanks for your attention.

Apple makes it pretty clear that they won't contact you unless it's to get more information on an issue you've reported on. That doesn't happen very often, but, as you've found out, there are cases in which it does happen.

Your input might have been key to that issue disappearing.

Regards,

Barry

Yes, she does.

You can prvide feedback to Apple, requesting this feature, via the Provide Pages Feedback item in the Pages menu.

Regards,

Barry

See the script below.

You can make the first line a comment (-- some text) if you just want bold without color.