Reformatting Problem

[Mallick]

Hello, folks,

I'm trying to reformat some text I've received through email. What I want to do is take out the blank lines between paragraphs, take out the line endings in the paragraphs so that they flow and then replace the blank lines.

According to the list of regular expressions in the help file '\n' denotes a line end and '^$' denotes a blank line. Well, yes I can find the blank lines with '^$' but there's no way I can find "line end" followed by "blank line", which is what I want to do.

Someone help me, please?

David

[RoryOF]

The "line end" followed by a "blank line" is most probably caused by the paragraph style definition in use. For that paragraph style use /Format /|Styles and Formatting, click on first icon from left, right click on the style in question and choose "modify" from the popup. Now select "Indents and Spacing" tab and change Spacing: Above paragraph and Spacing: Below paragraph settings to 0 (zero)

If you are going to use OpenOffice Writer regularly, you should read up on Styles and forget about direct formatting.

[John_Ha]

Switch on non-printing characters by View > Non-printing characters so you can see what is happening.

[RoryOF]

As John_Ha says. If the line is blank, with no backwards P on it, then it originates from the style as I said above. If it has a backwards P on it, then it should be findable by your macro.

[John_Ha]

It is difficult, but not impossible, to remove End of Paragraph (backwards P or ¶) marks by Find and Replace, even with Regular Expressions. Search the forum for some ideas on how to do it or, perhaps quicker, delete them manually. There is a macro of several hundred lines which can remove most End of Paragraph marks - see the Macros and UNI API Forum.

I think the Alternative Search and Replace add-on can find and replace End of Paragraph marks as it uses direct language coding for the ¶ and not Regular Expressions.

If this solves the problem, please edit your original post title to [Solved].