As it happens it's dead easy.

Go to the find and change dialogue

Click on the Grep Tab

Click on the magnifying glass next to the find format

Click on Basic....

Click on Italic (take care to get the right Italic 99.9% of the time it's Italic)

Click OK

On the Change part Type <i>$0</i>

Click change all

I'll leave it to you to figure out how to do the bold one

Do yourself's a favor blokes and read Peter's book on Greps! http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596156015.do

Hi Peter,

From reply #3 I think I think I understood what Cheencha was asking, but we shall wait and see.

If one wants to go Bob's way and the document was already written then one should use find and change to set the bold / italic character style so they can be mapped.

Trevor

My own findings on this subject are that it's not as straight forward as you might think to do this. Even when you map the tags to styles, it adds classes and not the tag you would require. However, there seems to be a way around it.

As has been mentioned here, if you create paragraph and character styles for your text - character for italic and bold, paragraph for headings - and then create tags (window > utilities > tags) the same as the HTML ones - h1, p, em, strong etc - you can then map the styles to those tags. However, when you export as HTML these are still converted to CSS classes and if you don't export the CSS, they all become <p> tags with <span>. Instead, export it as XML and change the file extension to HTML as you do this. It will correctly export the HTML tags but without the CSS styling. It depends on your workflow as to whether this is useful because you may be looking for both the CSS and the tags. In which case, I would probably do 2 exports. It may also be easier to export as HTML and then find and replace the generated classes with the tags. Eg. Find <span class="italic">, replace with <em>.

I came across this old article for CS2 that kind of covers this but it might have changed since: http://indesignsecrets.com/how-to-export-basic-html-out-of-cs2.php

Also, <i> and <b> are not deprecated - there are just better alternatives in most cases like <em> and <strong>.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_b.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_i.asp

OK. I now see where I have either gone wrong, or got confused.

I set the file up, with paragraph styles and character styles and then opened the tags window and created appropriate tags. I then used Map Tags to Styles (or Map Styles to Tags) to create the link between them. As you can see from my structure, this worked fine. On export this did not create the HTML tags required. However, when I went into the Paragraph/Character style palette and edited the export tags, they were unmapped. I mapped them and got the same result as Bob.

As that is the case, what is the point of the 'Map Tags to Styles' option if the tags are not exported?

P.s. Shame we never heard from Cheena