[bksvol-discuss] Re: Fw: clearing out line breaks
- From: "Gerald Hovas" <geraldhovas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 11:07:48 -0600
OK, I tried to stay out of this because I knew if I got started, I'd have
trouble stopping <smile>.
There aren't always Manual Line Breaks at the end of lines. Sometimes it's
Paragraph Markers. That's why you need to look to see what you're dealing
with like Kelly said. You can do this with Ctrl-Shift-8 in Word.
Paragraph Markers (^p) are what you get when you press Enter in Word. You
get Manual Line Breaks by pressing Shift-Enter in Word.
Some other handy symbols to know are ^m for Manual Page Breaks (Ctrl-Enter),
^t for tab, and ^w for whitespace. For those of you who aren't familiar
with the term whitespace, it's the invisible characters between words like
spaces and tabs.
If you decide to remove line feeds, then you may want to remove the
whitespace at the beginning and end of lines before removing ^p's or ^l's
from the end of the lines to prevent you from getting multiple spaces
between words. Also, since you can't be guaranteed that there are spaces at
the end of lines without checking every individual line, then it's better to
remove the white space at the beginning and end of the line, then replace
the ^l or ^p with a Space instead of nothing. This will keep you from
concatenating two words by accident and getting multiple spaces between
words. To remove whitespace only at the beginning or end of a line when
Paragraph Markers are at the end of lines, replace ^p^w with ^p or ^w^p with
^p. You could also replace ^w^p^w with ^p if you want to do both at the
same time.
If you do remove the whitespace at the beginning or end of lines, then you
will not have whitespace on blank lines and can remove multiple blank lines
by doing something like replacing ^p^p^p with ^p^p. This doesn't work for
blank lines at the top of a page. For that you'll need to do something like
replacing ^m^p^p with ^m^p. Any time you set out to remove multiple blank
lines, you will want to continue doing the search and replace until Word
tells you that no changes were made.
The reason I used the Paragraph Markers in the example above is that if
you're dealing with Paragraph Markers at the end of lines, and you remove
multiple blank lines, then you can replace two consecutive Paragraph Markers
with Manual Line Breaks (^p^p with ^l^l), then remove the Paragraph Markers
at the end of the lines, then change the Manual Line Breaks back to
Paragraph Markers. Of course, this would only work if your document happens
to have blank lines between paragraphs.
In case you didn't realize it. You can also add a blank line to the top and
bottom of a page by replacing ^m with ^p^m^p. This may cause you to have
one or more multiple blank lines at the top or bottom of a page though, but
you should already be able to deal with that from an earlier example. If
you do decide to add or delete blank lines at the top or bottom of pages,
then I'd suggest doing this before you strip headers so you can check every
page as you go.
If you do decide to make changes using a global search and replace, then
take precautions like Kelly said and make a backup copy of the file before
you start experimenting with it. Also, like Sarah said, read through it,
(or at the very least skim through it and spot check a large part of it)
after making global search and replaces. Also, spell check it again after
doing the global search and replaces. like Tony said. And, not to leave out
Dave, you can get yourself into trouble quickly if you're not careful. As
he said, there's no more accurate way than doing it manually. The only
problem with that is that it's tedious. OK, did I forget to acknowledge
anyone? <smile>
Also, you don't have to hit Alt-E E to get to the Search and Replace dialog
box in Word. Ctrl-H will also take you there.
See, I told you I'd have a problem stopping once I got started <smile>.
OK, Sue, I think you wanted to live dangerously and cause a lot of trouble
this week. This should help you get started. <grin>
Gerald
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Tony Baechler
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 2:13 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Fw: clearing out line breaks
Hi list. I'll just add that to do a similar thing with Word, or at least
Word 2000, search for ^l to find the line breaks. One really easy way to
fix split words is to go into the find and replace dialogue with Alt, E,
E. Search for the following in the find edit box:
-^l
Replace with nothing. Instantly your split words are gone. This also
takes out the line break, so you might have lines with only one or two
words on them. I don't have a good way to solve that. Also make sure you
do a spell check because some compound words that should be hyphenated will
need to have the dash put back in, like "twentyone" instead of "twenty-one."
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