[Tex/LaTex] Search for word and italicize

formattingitalic

I'm using LaTeX to format my books now. When I transitioned one of my books from Word to LaTeX, the italicized words didn't carry over, so I used the command \textit{word}. But after sending it to my editor, I see that one group of words needs to be italicized every time.

I need to make the words "South Park" italicized in the entire document. I found one suggestion that I could put in the preamble:

\newcommand*{\southpark}{\textit{South Park}}

But this wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'm looking for a command that can search my document for "South Park" and italicize every instance of it. Is this possible?

Best Answer

It is not exactly what you want, but very close, I hope. You can use your editor to change every occurence of the word South (with the word Park after it) into \South (backslash added). Then the definition as in the following example does the rest.

\documentclass{article}

\def\South Park{\textit{South Park}}

\begin{document}

This is \South Park, this is \South Park, this is \South Park, this is \South Park, this is \South Park, but beware: this is also \South 
Park.

\end{document}

enter image description here

Limitations: The word Park must appear after \South. Otherwise TeX will stop with an error message.

From Word to LaTeX via `Writer2LaTeX`

I will not repeat the manual of Writer2LaTeX, which you should read. But after some years I've got some practical experience:

It is usefull to delete as much of the layout in Word as possible.
The whole text should be in one language, make sure that Open/LibreOffice gets that as well. Otherwise you'll end with hundreds of \foreignlanguage-commands or similiar.
Experiment with the different possibilities of Writer2LaTeX. But I found the option "very tidy article" (my translation from German "sehr aufgeräumter Artikel") produces the best output.
Find the most complicated chapter, and really experiment with it until you are satisfied.
Clutterd, complicated code after \begin{document} indicates that something is going wrong.
Usually UTF8 is a good encoding. Depending on your editor on the LaTeX-side be carefull that the editor recognises UTF8 and that you really got that encoding.
If you have to change or delete a mass of, let's say, \\ \\ \\, this is a very good moment to learn a bit about "regular expressions". Doing deletions and changes manually, especially with 45 chapters, will probably take much longer than learning regexp.

Often it is faster to learn something about LaTeX by reading an introduction and the manual of a package (you get the manual by typing texdoc packagename on the command line), than wildly guessing how something could work.

[Tex/LaTex] automatically apply special formatting to selected words in text

Compile this with XeLaTeX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color,xesearch}

\SearchList*{redwords}{\textcolor{red}{#1}}{hello}

\begin{document}
This is hello and this is hellow.
\end{document}

enter image description here

But don't use it. If you want to specially mark a word, use a macro.

Why? Relying on automatic procedures is always risky: if I have a choice, I prefer explicit mark up. Another reason is that xesearch is resource hungry and currently unmaintained.

There's nothing similar for pdflatex; something can possibly be done with LuaLaTeX. I tried chickenize but it doesn't seem to offer the feature.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] automatically apply special formatting to selected words in text

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