A user named SGill offered a clever Applescript to change the highlighting of a searched-for word. I would like to be able to search for a given font attribute—bold, italic, roman—and change it to another. This was possible in Pages 09 using the find/replace feature, but that capability has been missing since Page 09. Does anyone have a sutiable AppleScript script that will address this lacuna?
iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13.4)
Keep using Pages '09.
Must you use the latest version? If so why?
Peter
I was not accurate in my description of what I want to do with Applescript. Is it possible to have a script wherein one can specify a text string and then have the option of change that string's font attributes (Roman, Italic, Bold)? I can do it for a single word, but not for a phrase.
The problem is that Page '09 is like a decaying isotope: getting weaker all the time. Right now, some features don;t work. I'm told that, as a 32 bit app, it soon won;t work at all. Even though Pages is much less robust than Word, I still prefer it. If only they could add back a few features—more robust search and replace, user conveniences like non-contiguous & columnar search, more robust typographic and image resources, printing comments and maybe printing selected text, and, finally, mail merge: wow! I think Pages 09 had all, or almost all, those features. In any event, being able to search for and replace formatting is a big deal for my needs.
The following AppleScript will change the specified font on each word of the first occurrence of the string in the Pages v7.0 document. Since we are simply matching document words to the words in the string, it is a much more difficult problem (at least late at night) to match all occurrences of the provided string, and change these fonts too.
property HNR : "HelveticaNeue-Regular"
property HNI : "HelveticaNeue-Italic"
property HNB : "HelveticaNeue-Bold"
set fontface to HNB
try
set theStr to text returned of (display dialog "Enter your text string: " default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK")
on error errmsgnumbererrnbr
return
end try
tell application "Pages"
tell body text of front document
set bodyText to a reference to it
my change_string_font(bodyText, theStr, fontface)
end tell
end tell
return
on change_string_font(btext, aStr, afont)
set strCnt to count of words of aStr
set theCnt to 0
set {TID, AppleScript'stext item delimiters} to {AppleScript'stext item delimiters, space}
set theStrWords to text items of aStr
set AppleScript'stext item delimiters to TID
repeat with aword in words of btext
if theCnt = strCnt then exit repeat
if (theStrWords contains aword) is true then
set font of aword to afont
set theCnt to theCnt + 1
end if
end repeat
return
end change_string_font
replace formatting with AppleScript in Pages?
