Engine, I am not familiar with the technique you mentioned, and it did not work for me (see attached), but it looks useful.


Questions:
1. What do you mean "loop"? Is this a macro function or a regular command I have never heard of?
2. In the attached, I styled two lines as Heading one, saved the doc to a txt file, opened a new Word docx, pasted the text in, ran Find and Replace with <:h1> in Find field and the Heading 1 style in Replace, and replaced all. Please explain what happened.

Thanks.

Attached Files

Tag.docx (15.1 KB, 11 views)

Looping is a common programming technique - go back to beginning and do again, just a little differently. It is also used in cross examination with good results.

Error as to paragraph styles: see next two posts
You need to identify the beginning and end of the replace area. i.e select the paragraph that begins with <:h1> and apply Heading 1 style. Macros to do this sort of thing need to be written rather than recorded.

Otherwise, you could bracket <:h1>the text<:h1> you want the style applied to and use WildCards to do the replace. I know this can be done, just don't have the experience to tell you how.
Find and Replace Using Wildcards by Graham Mayor

Charles, may I venture to disagree? for paragraphs, I'm not sure that paired XML-style tags would help. They'd take longer to put in to the original Word file, unless you have a helpful colleague who can write a macro to top and tail each paragraph with the name of its current style, and would probably be tricker to run search/replace on. Beautifully prepared text with significant character styles <cite>, <strong>, <emphasis> would be a different case.

John, an observation/apology: I should have added 'remove all autonumbering' as something to do before saving as .txt – the default behaviour here is one of the differences between Word and my usual documentation tool. My failure to do so probably accounts for the duplicate numbering: it looks as though the first (leftmost) number is being applied by the style, while the second is just text.

As for the persistence of the <:h1> tag, it's a question of how you beat search/replace into submission. Let's say your input file starts like this:

1. Start the two-step search and replace with Find what? <:h1>, Replace with Style: Heading 1 – this uses the tag to apply the style
2. Still with <:h1> in the Find what? field, click [No Formatting] at the bottom of the dialogue, then click [Replace All] – this deletes the tag, which has now served its purpose

HTH