Background/Context:

For work, I frequently need to read long PDF's. I don't need to read them for perfect comprehension and I am capable of listening to content at a much faster speed than I can read it myself. I have a text to speech program I am happy enough with (Text Aloud). The problem is that the PDF's are heavilly footnoted, and I do not want to include the footnotes in the audio. The solution I have found is to convert the PDF to word. The word versions include the footnote text as regular body text (i.e. not in the footer), but put them in smaller font than the body text. The exact font size varies (even within the same document), do to imperfect OCR comprehension.

Question:

I understand how to use wildcards ^? and formatting rules to replace all text of a certain format with nothing and thereby delete it. How can I use VBA or some other feature, to remove ALL text that is NOT of a certain formating trait, within manually running the replace function many times?

Can you post a sample document? You can attach files to the forum if you click Go Advanced.

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com

A fairly simple non-vba way to extract all text of a given attribute is to
• mark all the text as hidden
• use Find/Replace to find all text in your attribute and format as unhidden
• copy the document, then use Paste Special>Unformatted text. This will delete all the hidden text. What remains is the text in your attribute.

A fairly simple non-vba way to extract all text NOT of a given attribute is to use Find/Replace to find all text in your attribute and delete it. What remains is the content in not that attribute .

In each case, you'd probably want to save the results as a new file...

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

That solves my problem beautifully. And makes me feel stupid in the best way. Very nice solution thank you!