Remove styles while retaining formatting?

[tt327]

Hi:

I am wrapping up a book for an academic press, which has recently given me
their list of style requirements. One of them is that they do not want
styles but plain text. I use styles. Is there a way to remove them while
retaining the formatting? Or do I have to go through and manually change
everything? Since the book is 400 pages, this is not an appealing prospect.
I could go through and change everything to "Normal," but then it would be
hard to tell where paragraphs end and begin, etc.

Thanks!

Tim

 

[Charles Kenyon]

What happens if you save it as a text file?
File > Save As?

When they tell you that they do not want styles, do they mean Word styles,
or do they mean things like italic or bold formatting?
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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[tt327]

Saving as a text file retains a few things such as paragraph indentation and
headers that are in caps, but that's about it. I would have to go back and
re-italicize things, etc. Since this book is an academic book and has nearly
a 40-page bibliography, and lots of footnotes, it's not really an option at
this point.

Thanks for the suggestion, though!

Tim

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

What about Save As RTF (Rich Text Format)? I know that preserves notes and
bold and such, and think it should wipe styles, though you may need to open
it in some other program to tell.

 

[tt327]

Saving as an RTF seems to retain all styles. Pretty nifty, but not what I
need!

Thanks

Tim

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Tim

I am wrapping up a book for an academic press, which has recently given me
their list of style requirements. One of them is that they do not want
styles but plain text. I use styles. Is there a way to remove them while
retaining the formatting? Or do I have to go through and manually change
everything? Since the book is 400 pages, this is not an appealing prospect.
I could go through and change everything to "Normal," but then it would be
hard to tell where paragraphs end and begin, etc.

At this point, you need to get back to the publisher: if he really wants
"plain text", there's no such thing as italics in there. If not, make
him specify more clearly!

BTW: if you select the whole document (Ctrl A) and then apply Normal
style (Ctrl Shift N), then direct formatting such as bold or italic
should be retained (unless it's part of the style ...).

Greetinx
Robert

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Bottom-posted:

Hi Tim



At this point, you need to get back to the publisher: if he really wants
"plain text", there's no such thing as italics in there. If not, make
him specify more clearly!

BTW: if you select the whole document (Ctrl A) and then apply Normal
style (Ctrl Shift N), then direct formatting such as bold or italic
should be retained (unless it's part of the style ...).

If bold/italic is part of the style, you can use Find and Replace to find
all text in a certain style and apply direct formatting to it. Leave both
boxes empty, format the Find as the style, and the Replace as direct
formatting.

I would do this on a COPY. I'm not sure how you would then remove the
styles, or what would happen when you tried, or whether you would need to
change the style before doing this. Direct character formatting should
stay--not sure about other things. What else do you need to retain besides
italic titles?

DM