Using PowerFind

[Stef]

I have a long typescript in which all the family names have been entered in uppercase letters (eg., Donald DUCK). I have to get all the family names into small capitals (with, of course, the first letter being capitalised).

Manually, and taking one name at a time, you can use the menus to (1) Transform to lowercase (from "DUCK" to "duck"); then (2) Capitalise (from "duck" to "Duck"); then (3) Transform to Small Capitals. But there are hundreds of these things in the document, and this would take hours and hours and hours.

It seems to me that the Nisus PowerFind feature should be able to handle this, but I just can't figure it out.

So far, I've figured out how to find all uppercase words ("AnyUppercaseLetterAnyUpercaseLetter1+" or "[[:upper:]][[:upper:]]+"), but I can't work out how to do the entire conversion. I'm not even sure if the entire conversion — from a word all in capitals, to a word in lower case letters with the first letter capitalised, to a word in small capitals — is possible, although it seems that it must be.

I'm new to Nisus and, rather than going through the names individually, I reckon this would be a good opportunity to learn this powerful feature of the program. Any help anyone might be able to offer would be greatly appreciated.

Stef

[phspaelti]

You have pretty much figured it out. In your case you should just use PowerFind (using Find All) to find all the things you want. This will create a non-contiguous selection of all the bits you want to change. With all of that selected you can just do as you would for a single instance: (1) use "Capitalize" to make them lowercase with initial capital, then (2) apply "Display as Small Caps".

One small point that I might suggest is to first create a Character Style "Family Name", and then apply that to the found names. That style could then also be used to apply the "Display as Small Caps". A style like that can also be used to quickly 'mark/show' all instances, by, for example (temporarily) changing the style definition to show a text, background or highlight color. It also can be very handy to select all the names at once again, since Nisus allows you to select all bits that have the same style (e.g. Character Style > Select All Style).

[adryan]

G’day, Stef et al

Philip just beat me to the Capitalized to Small Caps trick.

But you need to be aware that a complication will arise if the list contains names such as “McDonald”, “MacDonald” or “Macdonald”. There would also be problems if the text contains uppercase strings that are not family names.

Of course, Nisus Writer can handle such contingencies, in various ways. It depends on whether you need it to.

Cheers,
Adrian

[Stef]

Thanks, Philip and Adrian, for your quick replies, and for your suggestions. They are very helpful.
That little Find/Replace dialogue box certainly has a great deal of power. The way the "Find All" button functions, providing the ability to work on all of the selected text at once, is indeed an extremely powerful feature of the program. It had hitherto escaped me.
Stef