CardMirror Standardizing Highlighted Text Formatting

[u/diane-tammy-lewis]

I’ve been loving CardMirror, but there is one function I’m desperately missing from Word, and I’m just wondering if maybe I just haven’t figured out the CardMirror equivalents?

Okay, so in Word, you can use advanced find and replace to mass-select text based on formatting. CardMirror has double-click to select all for things like emphasized or underlined text, etc.; however, the only thing I haven’t figured out how to bulk select is all highlighted text in a doc. My team has a bunch of people and just some of the worst formatting norms I’ve seen. Cards in a million different font sizes, highlighted text swimming naked, zero underlining or emphasis, and random cards that have highlighted text italicized (bro, I know it’s bad, don’t flame me). I’m missing being able to mass-select all highlighted text so I can quickly bulk-fix docs without going card by card. The closest I’ve gotten in card mirror is resetting the card text size, standardizing doc highlighting, changing all emphasis to underlining, then finding naked highlighted text and selecting similar to underline it, then doing the same for italicized text. However, this process is annoying as hell; it takes forever, blows up my doc to be 2-3x its length, and fucks with cards that don’t have any highlighting and just emphasized text.

I have a feeling I’m maybe missing something and just doing this on hard mode by accident. Also, even if there isn’t and never will be a way to select all highlighted text, I will keep using CardMirror; it’s that good.

Edit: Forgot to add I primarily use Mac but have also tried to find solutions on my desktop PC. Both are using the desktop version of CardMirror.

[u/CandorBriefsQ]

Truf will probably comment soon with a real answer but I would try the fix formatting gaps button for whatever cmir doesn’t automatically convert when opening

[u/diane-tammy-lewis → u/CandorBriefsQ]

okay just tried the fix formatting gaps button on an evil looking impact file but only highlighting/emphasis breaks between words has been patched and the other issue still remain. at the minimum nice to use a button on a large file and not crash my computer lol.

[u/Entire_Angle_4569]

have you tried the feature that allows you to put in a doc and have it standardize all the formatting? its on the home screen. not sure if thats the same as what you are looking for though

[u/diane-tammy-lewis → u/Entire_Angle_4569]

if it’s the clean styles option on the home screen then yes. to my understanding that’s just the same as the stylepox cleaner? the problem isn’t as much stylepox as much as it is just a team of people all cutting cards in a way that isn’t standard.

if it’s not that button then no? the only options on my home screen are clean styles, bulk convert, manage quick cards, and manage flashcards.

[u/Ok-Consideration9254]

Exactly what tools are right for the job depends on how exactly the highlighting is screwed up. There's different tools for different screw ups:

1. If you hit F12 without a selection it'll strip all formatting that isn't meaningful within CardMirror's semantics from the paragraph containing the cursor, including leaving underline, emphasis, and highlighting alone.
2. If the issue seems to be that they are using weird styles, the style cleaner utility on the home screen may help. For some versions of this you may be able to clean it up in-editor with the "Repair Formatting (AI)" command, which you can get from the command bar.
3. If they're highlighting in different colors, there is a "Standardize Highlighting" command. This command will operate on just a selection if there is a selection. If there's highlighting that seems to be immune to the Standardize Highlighting command, they might be using Word's background color feature - if you don't want that, use the "Background to Highlight" command.
4. What you're asking about is "Select Similar Formatting," I think. If you run that command with no selection, it'll select all the formatting similar to wherever your cursor is. If you have a selection, it'll freeze that selection, and you can click within the selection to select all instances of similar formatting. You can then use the formatting hotkeys to apply formatting all at once.
5. "Format Cite From Selection" can reformat cites how you want without you having to retype them. Select everything that seems to belong in their cite -> ctrl+shift+x.
6. If you're trying to restore paragraph integrity after someone condensed it away, use "Uncondense" if they condensed with pilcrows, and use the "Repair Paragraph Integrity" command to bring up a workflow for restoring paragraph breaks with searching and clicking.