remove all occurrences of a format

[RickHenkel]

I just found out that the writers in my group are applying background colors to text to indicate different iterations of documentation to reviewers. Seems that they've been applying local formatting on the appropriate paragraphs. When they're done, they go through a project, file by file, to remove the local formatting. When I checked the code for some of their topic files, it looked to me like many of the <span> tags were still there, even though the topic didn't display any apparent local formatting.

I thought I'd at least add some <span> tags to the stylesheet so they're no longer using local formatting. But I was wondering what, if anything, I could do to make the removal of those background colors easier. I tried setting the background color of the different paragraph formats to default, but that didn't seem to help. Is there some other way to globally remove those <span> formats?

Or, on a related question, is there a different way that they could be marking their iterations?

[LTinker68]

I believe MadCap Analyzer will find all inline styles for you. At which point you have the option to create a class out of them. There's probably an option to remove the styles, too. If not, then once you create the styles, you can do a find-and-replace in Flare to remove the class from the parent tag.

[RickHenkel]

Thanks, Lisa. I'll take a look at that, but we unfortunately have no more software money right now. Is there something I could do until we can afford Analyzer?

[LTinker68]

Well, you can run the trial version of Analyzer.

You can do a find-and-replace in Flare. Set it to look for the inline styles on the span tag and replace them with a class name. For instance, if the tag set is something like <span style="color:#FF0000;font-weight:bold;">Text text text</span>, then have Flare search (in the source code) for style="#FF0000;font-weight:bold;" and replace it with class="redBold" or whatever you named the class that has those style characteristics.

[RickHenkel]

Thanks, Lisa.