Changing Text & Placing a New Story in PageMaker

Changing Text

The Change command searches for a word, or formatting attribute and replaces it with another. This may be use, for example, to have a replacement of shorthand codes typed throughout the story, where typing the actual word(s) may be cumbersome. 

In order to do this, move the cursor to the beginning of the story and choose Utilities>Change or press Ctrl + H. Next to Find What, type the text you want to find. Next to Change To, type the replacement text. If needed, turn on Match Case and Whole Word option. To replace text in all the stories in the publication, turn on the All Stories option. Or to replace text in all stories in all open publications, turn on the All Publications option. Choose the Change All command button to replace all occurrence without prompting. If you do not want to replace all the occurrences of the given text, you can use the Find & Change and Find command buttons. After filling in the Change dialog box, click the Find button. PageMaker then stops at the first occurrence of the word. If you want to replace the word, choose the Change & Find button to change the word and find the next occurrence. If you do not want to replace the word, choose Find Next to search for the next occurrence.

As already mentioned, the Change command can also find and replace special characters, such as carriage returns and tabs. The carriage return code is ^p, and the tab code is ^t. You should actually type the caret (^); do not press the Ctrl. To remove tabs, search for ^t and do not type anything in the Change To text box, because you want to replace the tab space with nothing.

An extremely powerful use of the Change command is to search for and replace formatting attributes. You can replace fonts, sizes, type styles and paragraph styles. This capability makes is easy to revise a story’s formatting. To replace one or more attributes, use the Char Attributes or Para Attributes command button in the Change dialog box. In the top half of the box, you indicate the attributes you want to locate. In the bottom half, you specify the new attributes.

Placing a New Story

There are two ways to create a new story in the Story Editor. You can either press Ctrl + E in layout view, with no story selected, or choose New Story from the Story menu when you are in story view. When you create a new story in the Story Editor, it exists only in the Story Editor – it is not part of the publication. To incorporate it into your document, you must close the story window and place it on the page. After you close the window, you will be warned that your story has not been placed. Choose the Place command button, and the cursor turns into a loaded text icon. Just place the icon at the top of the first column in which you want to place the text and click.