Check if there is more than one font color used in a document

guyglk · #1 01-26-2019, 07:19 PM

Hi. I'm trying to figure out how to find if a document uses more than one font color.

(Using Word 2007 and 2013)

I also needed to find if the document uses any highlighted text. This way fairly easy. I used the 'find' command for that. I can't seem to replicate the same principle for font color though.

I tried looping through every character, which works - but incredibly slowly - I had to deem it inapplicable. I don't know how the find command manages to find highlighted text at light speed.. almost regardless of document's character count.

Does anyone have any idea how I can achieve this (check if there is more than one font color used throughout) just as quickly? The colors are unknown/nonimportant - the only important thing for me here is to make sure that the document uses only one color for font, throughout.

Thank you!

gmayor · #2 01-26-2019, 10:23 PM

Try the following

Code:

Sub MakeBlack()
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.Font.Color = wdColorBlack
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = "*"
        .Replacement.Text = "^&"
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = True
        .MatchWildcards = True
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
 End Sub

macropod · #3 01-26-2019, 10:49 PM

Testing whether a document uses more than one font colour or highlight is as simple as:

Code:

Sub Demo()
With ActiveDocument.Range
  MsgBox "Font Colour: " & .Font.ColorIndex
  MsgBox "Highlight Colour: " & .HighlightColorIndex
End With
End Sub

If the returned value is 9999999 for either, there is more than one of that property in use (no highlight counts as one).

guyglk · #4 01-26-2019, 11:53 PM

Thank you both!
I will try this..

Greatly appreciated, thanks!

guyglk · #5 01-28-2019, 03:56 PM

Hi again,

Well, it turns out I need to exclude spaces and other characters when looking for any different font colors... so the two-liner bit, as excellent as it is - is too "document-generic" for me.

I thought about going at it this way, using the find command (the code below is a crude version of what I'm after):

Outline (just to be clear of what I was trying to achieve in plain English, in case I missed something code-wise):
1. Go to the first character in the document
2. Search for that color font (grab and use the first character's font color as criteria) using find while ignoring spaces
3. Check if find bumps into any different color other than that of which is being searched (if find.found=false I think...)

Code:

Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Font.Color = Selection.Font.Color
With Selection.Find
    .Text = "*[! ]"
    .Font.Color = Selection.Font.Color
    .MatchWildcards = True
    .Wrap = wdFindContinue
    .Format = True
    .Forward = True
    .Execute
End With

If Selection.Find.Found = False Then MsgBox "Found another color." _
Else MsgBox "Did not find any other color."

The problem: it always gives "Did not find any other color." whether the document has only one font color used or more.

I'm not sure what to do next. Any ideas on how to improve this?

Thanks,

macropod · #6 01-28-2019, 04:11 PM

Fairly obviously, I'd have thought, you could test a document via code like:
If .Font.ColorIndex = 9999999 Then
from where you might take an approach like that demonstrated in https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Fo...-word-document to compile a list of the colours in use (the code in the link tests for Styles, but the principle is the same). The main difference you'll need to consider is whether you need to return only colorindex values or whether you need to return values from the full RGB spectrum.

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