Elimination of margin numbers in deposition

[gbernier]

I have a number of legal depositions that I have to read. I have them in the
form of pdf files which I have converted to Word documents. I'd like to use a
TTS reader to reduce the burden a bit.

The problem is that each page has 25 numbered lines:

1 | Q. statement ...................................
2 | A. statement....................................
3 |............................................................

Is there any simple way to just remove the margin numbers. I have found that
I can use 'replace' to replace all digits with nothing. But, that also
eliminates dates that might be important.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The answer depends entirely on what the PDF-to-Word converter did to
create the line numbers.

If it turned on actual line numbering, you can turn that off by going
to File > Page Setup > Layout (or in Word 2007, click the little arrow
button in the lower right corner of the Page Setup group on the Page
Layout tab, then click the Layout tab). Click the Line Numbers button,
and uncheck the Add Line Numbering box.

If it's like the Pleading template that ships with Word, the numbers
are in a text box anchored in the header. Open the header pane, click
the text box to select it, and press Delete.

If the conversion was really stupid, the line numbers are actually
part of the text, with a paragraph mark or a line break at the end of
each line. In that case, you might be able to use a wildcard Replace
to replace the expression

^13[0-9]{1,2}

with nothing (or use ^10 instead of ^13 if there are line breaks
rather than paragraph marks).

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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