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The script searches for text formatted with Bold, Italic, Underline, Superscript, Subscript and Small Capitals and replaces it with a character style with an appropriate name. Replacing manual formatting with a character style has significant advantages, the most important ones are that you no longer can accidently remove them (when overriding paragraph attributes), and afterwards, you can change the styles at will.

There are a few points you must keep in mind:

1. The script searches for font styles named "Bold" and "Italic". If you happen to use a font where these are called "Semibold", "Black" or "65 Bold" or "Slanted", "Oblique" or "46 Light Italic" it will not find these. If you need styles applied to these attributes, do so by hand.
2. The script searches for attributes such as "superscript", "subscript", "small capitals". If small caps are faked in the document with capitals in a smaller font, the script will not find them. If superscript or subscript are faked in the document with a smaller font size and some baseline shift, the script will not find them.
3. Word has a lot of different underline styles; InDesign only has one. It is possible to search specifically for 'double underline', 'dotted underline', etc. but you have to do this by hand. The script picks up any and all kinds of underline as one and the same -- Underline. (See also #5 below.)
4. The script creates new character styles as needed; these are all independent, not based-upon eachother. If you have 3 styles with 'Bold' in them and you want to change the bold font to semi-bold, you will have to do that for each separate style that contains Bold.
5. Any formatting other than those mentioned is not preserved or changed by this script. If you suspect your document has other types of formatting you want to preserve, replace these by hand with character styles. The script is hardcoded to ignore text that already has a character style,  something you can use in your advantage (when done properly).

Read the ID Help or http://indesignsecrets.com/how-to-install-scripts-in-indesign.php for instructions on how to install and use scripts.

Ever seen a paragraph style name with a '+' added to it? That's an indication the paragraph contains 'local formatting' somewhere -- a manual override of the formatting in the paragraph style. If you select some text and apply "Italic", well, that's a manual override -- the font in the paragraph style specifies "Regular".

The problem with manual overrides is that they can disappear without warning. Try this: select some text in your document and underline it -- the paragraph style name will gain a '+'. Alt+click the paragraph style ("Apply Removing Overrides") -- the underline disappears. Or: change the paragraph style, adding 'underlined' to it. Press "OK" (all paragraphs in that style will be underlined), then change the style back, removing the Underline. Your manually applied underline will be gone.

If you never had any of these problems -- or you don't think of it as a problem -- you don't really need this script...

That was #1 of my 5-point "Watchit" list.

The main point is that the script cannot know in advance what the italic fonts are called.

I usually use 'Find Font' on new documents, and if I see quirky bold or italics, I just replace them immediately with a regular "Times New Roman Bold" and "Italic" so I'm sure the script will pick them up.

Yes, that's exactly what I do with "Find Font".

+ all the Book Italics are used in notes here in my document, and it seems you can't search in notes…

Let be clear.

I have a final text, with styles, in a word document.

In indesign i use one font for the main text, it have a real italic, called italic.

I use another font for footnotes, the font have italics too but its called 'book italic'.

So i run you your script, it works for the main text.

But for the footnotes i doesn't work, tried to apply an 'italic' style when the italic is called 'book italic'…

I can't fixe that seaching for italics on a specific font and change it for book italic for 1 reason :

— you can't seach in footnotes (it seems)

So i thought if i change the name 'book italic' for 'italic' in the OTF file, it would work.

Thanks for the tip i'm gonna try that.

PS. Offtopic but… do you know any word count script for Indesign ?

I made the search thing and it worked very well, thanks a lot for your help !

Sorry but what do you mean by "replace "Book Italic" with a custom character style"

Ok i got it

But this is the same as doin what i've done for my document, wich is : doing that AFTER running the script…

Same results, right ?

A super script. How to use it also in foonotes?

A good idea is to apply colours to the character styles. With this the document is very fast tested and subject to other exercises.

Thank you.

Jongware's free script is wonderful and a great help to many people. You might also look at the Create Basic Character Styles and Create All Character Styles features in the Blatner Tools plug-in (dtptools.com/bt), along with the Create Paragraph Styles (which can create paragraph styles for you throughout an unstyled document).