Removing Unwanted Paragraph Marks

[Guest]

I am editing a document created by someone else. It appears they put a
paragraph mark at the end of every line. When I change margins, lines break
in unusual places because of the paragraph marks. I've tried searching for
paragraph marks and replacing them with spaces, but that doesn't work. Any
suggestions other than manually going through the document line by line. It
is a long document. I thought there might be a clue in autoformat, but I
can't figure out how to use it.

 

[Guest]

I wonder how you were doing the replacements, because this is how to remove
the paragraph marks. In the Replace box enter ^p you actually don't need to
put anything in the replace with box. Just click on replace all and they
should all be removed.

 

[Guest]

You need to be careful of doing a "Replace All," since it may well make the
entire document a single paragraph, which will create problems of its own.

I go through a little more complex process when I have to convert documents
like this. My process is based on the assumption that there is usually a line
or paragraph break between paragraphs in a document like this. If there is
not a blank line between paragraphs, you will need to do something different.

First, I use the Replace function to change all instances of two spaces to a
single space. I often need to use the Change All option several times, since
there will be some places that have more than two spaces together.

When there are no more instances of two spaces together, I select the type
of character that ends each line (sometimes ^l, sometimes ^p, etc.) and
change all instance of that character to a space. ONLY RUN THIS FUNCTION ONE
TIME.

That should leave the entire document in a single huge paragraph, with
spaces where the paragraph or line breaks used to be (this way you don't run
words together), but there will be two spaces wherever paragraph breaks
occurred in the original.

Finally, use the Change function to change all instances of two spaces to a
paragraph break (^P). That should put paragraphs back where they were
originally.

Good luck,

Fred
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[Greg Maxey]

I wonder how you were doing the replacements, because this is how to remove
the paragraph marks. In the Replace box enter ^p you actually don't need to
put anything in the replace with box. Just click on replace all and they
should all be removed.
--
Rae Drysdale





- Show quoted text -

My Clean Up Text Addin will fix this and more for you:

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Clean_Up_Text.htm

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

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

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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