Removing Manual Line Breaks in Copied .pdf Text

[Guest]

I copied a large .pdf text into MicroSoft Word and it is full of manual line breaks (at the end of every sentence). I need to remove these if possible. Is there any way to do this all at once? The only thing I know to do is delete each break, which is too time consuming. Would appreciate any help you can give

Thanks

Crystal Longdon

 

[Bill Foley]

You could do a Find and Replace, searching for paragraph marks and replacing
them with a "space", but then you would end up with one might big paragraph.
You can play around with it though. To do this, try the following:

1. Click the "Edit" menu and select "Replace" (CTRL-H)
2. Click in the "Find what" box and click the "More" button
3. Click the "Special" button and select "Paragraph mark".
4. Click in the "Replace with" box and type a space.

If you do a "Replace all" then all paragraphs will be replaced with a space,
but you can click "Replace" and move through your document skipping the ones
you want to keep by clicking "Find next" when you want to skip one.

Good Luck!

--
Bill Foley, Microsoft MVP (PowerPoint)
www.pttinc.com
Check out PPT FAQs at: http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/

I copied a large .pdf text into MicroSoft Word and it is full of manual

line breaks (at the end of every sentence). I need to remove these if
possible. Is there any way to do this all at once? The only thing I know to
do is delete each break, which is too time consuming. Would appreciate any
help you can give.

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Often in a situation like this, for example, if there are paragraph marks at
the end of every line and two paragraph marks between paragraphs, you can
Find and Replace two paragraphs marks with $$$$. Then Find and replace with
a space (or nothing, depending) all paragraph marks, then Find and Replace
$$$$ with a paragraph mark. Running three F&Rs where you can hit Replace
All can be faster than manually checking them.

See also:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm

DM

 

[Bill Foley]

I agree. Since I went to the single space between sentences, it has
simplified my use of these multiple replaces on copied text. On text I grab
from elsewhere, I usually go with the:

1. Replace "two spaces" with "one space" (just a starting clean up option in
case there are two spaces between sentences)
2. Replace a "paragraph mark" with a "space"
3. Then do the final search for "two spaces" (actual paragraph breaks) and
replace with a paragraph mark (or two to get double-spacing).

I'm sure there are all sorts of options out there.