[bksvol-discuss]
- From: "Monica Ballard" <MBallard1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 00:19:28 -0400
I found a way to quickly remove page numbers that so far, has worked
pretty well. It's not as complicated as this long message implies. I just
tried to be thorough in the explanation.
There are some simple, if a bit cryptic, codes that can be used as
search terms for the Replace feature under the Edit Menu. With these codes,
it's possible to search for the pattern of spaces or text formatting that
surrounds the page number and remove it. The codes for formatting, and a
wild card for numeral, all begin with a caret (^), the symbol shared by the
numeral 6 on the keyboard. To figure out the pattern surrounding the text,
you have to turn on Show Formatting Marks on the Standard Toolbar. Here are
the codes I found most useful followed by an example.
^# is a wild card that stands for any digit, zero through nine.
^p stands for a paragraph mark.
^w stands for "white space," the blank space made with the space bar.
The page numbers in the scanned books occur in a repeating format, for
example: paragraph mark + number + blank space + paragraph mark. There are
variations, but for a given book the pattern tends to be consistent.
Here is what I recently typed in the "Find What" in the Find and
Replace box: ^p^#^#^#^w^p This removed all the three digit page numbers
from my document. Since I couldn't figure out how to get the Find What box
to search for a number of any length, I repeated the search two more times.
Each time I removed one of the ^# symbols so Find What could identify the
two digit numerals 10-99, and once more for the single digits. I didn't
need to retype the search terms because the Find and Replace box stays on
the screen after doing its work. I put my cursor in the Find What box and
removed a ^#.
It turned out having a pattern of empty spaces and paragraph marks
around the page numbers is handy because by using the pattern search there
is less risk of removing numerals that are part of the text.
I wish it were a more elegant solution. There is a wild card for any
number, not just digits zero through nine, but it doesn't work in
Find/Replace. I think it could work in a macro, but I couldn't figure out
the scripting language.
Monica Ballard
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