Removing Hard Line Breaks

[Guest]

I download a lot of 'txt' file books from Project Gutenberg. I then convert
them to MS ebooks using the add in available for download at the MS Reader
web section. But there's a problem. Being 'txt' files, they all have hard
line breaks at the end of each and every line. During the conversion to
Reader format, these hard line breaks stay with the text, making the
converted file very hard to read. Is there some kind of macro or add in that
will convert 'txt' files into regular '.doc' files (or '.docx' files)? I've
tried 'find and replace', but it creates it's own set of problems.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Word will open .txt files directly, edit them, and save them as .txt
files. You don't have to "convert" them in any way.

To remove the extra line breaks, see
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm.

 

[Guest]

Acutually, my question isn't so much about how to open and save the 'txt'
files. It's about how to make them readable during the conversion from 'txt'
to ebook format. This is especially true when I port the ebooks over to my
handheld device.

For short articles I can manually remove all of the hard line breaks. But
for a novel, this is impossibly long. With the hard breaks in place, the
resulting ebook is not formatted in the smooth, justified paragraphs that we
see in most ebooks.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The article I cited,
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm, explains
how to clear out all the extra line breaks in a few easy steps.