You have to make sure that the font has all changed to black again. Sorry if I'm not explaining this correctly. You have to make sure that the colour in the little box is black again and not red. After pasting the character, select it, go to colour selection, choose black and it will change. Then after pressing the spacing bar, the colour in the box might change back to red again. If this happens, then once again go to the colour selection for fonts and choose either black or the default colour. Sometimes, when typing, we forget that the space that follows the character in question will automatically have the same characteristics as the letter, number, or whatever of the previous one. I too have sometimes encountered this problem. Just have a bit of patience. Tina
"'God' brings us into each others lives for a reason and purpose that we may never know until the end. But every interaction that we have - even if just a simple smile, is a catalyst for something bigger, with a positive or negative outcome, so you must be aware of yourself so you can help another when it is needed." ~SchaOn | I'm trying to do my bit to help the environment and thought you | | may be interested in taking part? To join the movement on | | WAYN.com and help make a difference. | El Domingo, 31 de julio, 2016 18:46:03, Brian Barker <b.m.bar...@btinternet.com> escribió: At 18:45 31/07/2016 -0400, Brian Meadows wrote: >I have a draft of a bridge (the card game) book to work on. My >co-author and I have decided to use the suit symbols where possible, >and I need to make that change retrospectively. I know how to >substitute the red suit symbols for hearts and diamonds (I cheat by >copying the symbols from elsewhere in the text) but I can't work out >how to then switch back to black text after I've done the >substitution, if I change the text after the substituted symbol then >it comes out in red, which is NOT what I want. It's standard behaviour in all word processors, I think, that any new text typed in inherits its formatting from the immediately preceding text. >I tried adding a unique string in black after the symbol and then >substituting that out, nope, doesn't work, I still have the problem >that I seem to have switched to red text. No, you simply have one red character and Writer assumes that you would want anything following it also to be red. Imagine if this were not the case: if you added a single character in some text, perhaps to correct a spelling error, it would appear in some default format, and you would have to go back and change it to a different font, font size, bold, italic, whatever - like your existing formatted surrounding text! No: this arrangement is generally helpful. >This would take me about two minutes in dear old Word Perfect, ... That's because Word Perfect is both "dear" and "old" - in other words, that you are familiar with it. It takes much less than two minutes do something similar in OpenOffice - once you become familiar with that too. >I've spent more than two hours trying to solve the problem in OO. >Can someone please save my remaining sanity and tell me how to do >this, I have a LOT of symbols to substitute, far too many to do them by hand. You are seeing the problem as something different from what it is. Replacing your original text with red symbols is the right thing to do. You just need to find a way to add following text back in the default colour afterwards. And you won't have "a lot" of occasions where you need to do this - at least, not at once. Read on. >Secondary question: Is there any such thing as a 'reveal codes' >option in Open Office where you can see all these things like font >changes etc. embedded in your document? Yes and no. If you want to unpack the document file, the XML description of your document is indeed a markup language, and you could see something similar. But you would be very ill-advised to try to tinker with them there. Messing with the "codes" in Word Perfect was introduced to circumvent inefficiencies in the software, wasn't it? The trouble is that users became happy with interfering under the bonnet ("hood" if you are in that part of the world) and now don't appreciate being able to do things properly through the normal interface. So the short answer is "No": don't think of the problem that way. Here are a few techniques: o Is there generally a space after the symbol? Hopefully you won't have made that space red as well. If you type your additional material after that space, it will not become red. o In any case, instead of typing immediately after your coloured symbol, start one character to the right (or one word if you prefer), retype that spare character at the end of your new text, and return to delete the original single character afterwards. o Just type away in red, select your new text, and use the Font Colour drop-down in the Formatting toolbar to return the colour to Automatic (or whatever). A few thoughts: o Are you sure that your book publisher will want to print hearts and diamonds symbols in red in otherwise black text in your book? o Are you sure, if your publisher will print these in red, that their system will properly inherit the colours from your word processor document? It is probably more likely that the book designer will mandate that these symbols should be red (if that is the case) and the compositor will follow that instruction. In that case, you do not need your symbols to be coloured. At best, all you need is a note to the publisher about your preference. o You can probably make your life much easier by leaving the substitution until you have finished the book text. Then you won't need ever to insert text after your red symbols. Did your original have "hearts" and "diamonds"? Why not leave these and replace them once you have (more or less) finalised the text? Better still, why not type codes - perhaps something like #h and #d? - and replace these at the end? That way, there is less risk of your replacing the small number of occurrences of the words that you probably need to retain spelled out. I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org