Toggling paragraph breaks

[RoryOF]

Suppose I have a text, a Writer file (.odt format). In my text I have a sequence of paragraphs (Trivial example):

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Text 1 
Text 2 
Text 3 
Text 4  

For valid reasons, I may want these to show as

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Text 1 Text 2 Text 3 Text 4 

but be capable of being switched back to the separate line format, whether by setting an internal variable, eg "Collapse" = 0 or 1, or by running a small external program that massages the Writer XML.

Any thoughts on a method?

Reason: I am editing a long text written in 1810-20, which contains many letters. At that time it was usual that letters be not paragraphed, merely one long stream of punctuated text. But it may happen it is decided that, for easier comprehension by modern readers, the letters should be paragraphed. The insertion of paragraph breaks would in initial instance be done by hand, as the sense of the letter demands. Pending a final decision, it might be necessary to switch backwards and forwards between the paragraphed and unparagraphed formats. No such letter will exceed 64k characters in total (if that becomes a consideration).

Note that I write "insert paragraph breaks"; these could be some specific marker that appears as a paragraph break or disappears, depending on the state of the controlling internal variable.

[Mountaineer]

Some years ago I had to reformat texts, and used a macro for several steps of replacements.
I needed to mark some ends of paragraphs,
delete all paragraph-marks (pilcrow) and insert paragraphs at al marks.

I used a visible marking, but in your case I'd assume an invisible marker is necessary. A suggestion would be a special unicode char like "half-width-space" or maybe 4 of them.

J.

[RoryOF]

Thanks, Mountaineer; that offers a solution - I had not thought of using invisible markers - I had forgotten that such exist.

[JeJe]

You could use the pilcrow character ¶ and make them hidden or unhidden with character formatting.

Edit: and search/replace to/from real paragraph breaks.

[John_Ha]

White text is invisible too ...

[RoryOF]

The major problem with all suggestions is that F&R is unwilling to work across paragraph breaks.

[John_Ha]

Rory

I'm not sure that is correct.

Regular expressions are limited by, I think, end of paragraph. But F&R > Find all..., for example, searches the entire document.

[John_Ha]

Rory

I have nearly done it with the Alt F and R extension.

Set a % sign as the space between the text strings.

Use AF&R to change it to an end of para.

Now highlight the four lines and use AF&R to change the end of para back to a %.

It needs a few glitches sorted out, namely setting the replaced % to white and the last % doesn't seem to get inserted.

Edit: AF&R can set the colour of replaced text

[John_Ha]

Also, could you put the text in two sections, one in each format.

Now hide the relevant section.

[MrProgrammer]

The major problem with all suggestions is that F&R is unwilling to work across paragraph breaks.

The special regular expression $, if used alone, represents a paragraph break in the Search For field of the OpenOffice Find&Replace dialog and \n represents a paragraph break in its Replace With field.

Within five minutes I created this system and tested it on the toy example:
• Tools → Macros → Record Macro
• Edit → Find&Replace → SearchFor → $ → Replace with → ◊ → More Options → ✓ Regular Expressions → Replace All → Close
• Macro Name → Choose name → Save Macro In → Choose location → Save

• Tools → Macros → Record Macro
• Edit → Find&Replace → SearchFor → ◊ → Replace with → \n → More Options → ✓ Regular Expressions → Replace All → Close
• Macro Name → Choose name → Save Macro In → Choose location → Save

• Tools → Customize → Toolbars → New → Toolbar Name → Choose Name → Save In → Writer → OK
• Toolbar → Chosen name → Add → Category → OpenOffice Macros → Choosen macro location
→ Commands → First chosen macro name → Add
→ Commands → Second chosen macro name → Add → Close → OK

Now clicking on the new toolbar buttons performs the conversions. Depending on your needs you may want to enable More → Current Selection Only when recording these macros. Of course a custom written macro could provide far more capabilities, but perhaps this quick, simple system is sufficient.

A suggestion would be a special unicode char like "half-width-space" or maybe 4 of them.

While it may be inconvenient to type those in the File&Replace dialog, they can be in the clipboard and pasted in. ◊ above represents any character or sequence of characters.

[RoryOF]

Rory

I'm not sure that is correct.

Regular expressions are limited by, I think, end of paragraph. But F&R > Find all..., for example, searches the entire document.

F&R seems very sensitive to paragraph marks. I tried to set/unset some marks; they found first time, but not after they were unset (i.e., changed and unchanged a number of times).

[RoryOF]

Part of the problem is that in the file there is also commentary, which is delimited into paragraphs. The commentary must not be changed, only the paragraphing of the letters, and that may need to be switchable to/from paragraphs until a final decision is made.

I'm pondering XML code; a personal XML tag, of form <MyTag> some text </MyTag> in the content.xml does not show the "some text" string. In content.xml a paragraph mark is shown by

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End of paragraph text.</text:p><text:p text:style-name="Text_20_body">Start of new paragraph text

where Text_20_body is the name of the style to be applied to the new para. Remove the sequence </text:p><text:p ....> and the text flows from one para continuously into the next.

This code sequence could be placed between custom XML tags; if these tags can be switched on, then the para breaks are inserted. If the tags are switched off, then the breaks are not inserted, and the tags remain as a marker to be switched again if needed. I think this would need an XML schema to handle the tag switching; that schema, as I understand it, could be inserted into the content.xml code or referenced from it. But XML makes my head hurt!

I'll leave the matter stand for the present - other things to do and possibly months before this might be needed, by which time it might all have been done by hand anyway!

[JeJe]

You could have your working document as the paragraphs one and every time you want to see it the other way - create a new document from it with the all-in-one-line change. Then there's no need to have any form of marking.

[JeJe]

Here's a rudimentary implementation of my suggestion attached in case anyone ever wants something like it in future.

A toolbar toggles pilcrow characters in the selection to line feeds and vice versa or makes the pilcrows in the selection hidden text to hide them.

The lines with pilcrows would require their own paragraph style to enable a search for styles to easily find and select them separately from the rest of the document.

[MrProgrammer]

Part of the problem is that in the file there is also commentary, which is delimited into paragraphs

A recorded macro could still work if the portion to be expanded/collapsed has a distinguishing style. The recorded macro can use Search for Styles → Find All then restrict the replacement to Current Selection Only.

I'm pondering XML code; a personal XML tag, of form <MyTag> some text </MyTag>

Inserting an XML format sequence has some suggestions for editing XML in UNIX/Linux.

I wonder what OpenOffice will do when it finds the unexpected <MyTag>. If it chokes on that, surely it will accept an XML comment <!--comment--> though you'd have to test if OpenOffice would write the comment out again with File → Save. For hiding XML in a custom <MyTag>, it may be helpful to use the <![CDATA[…]]> syntax since CDATA can enclose arbitrary XML without the need to escape <, &, etc.

[RoryOF]

In haste: I found that it accepted the <MyTag> ... <\MyTag> sequence and ignored that sequence and its contents.

My memory of some years ago was that it didn't like the <![CDATA[...]] syntax, but if II have time later I'll explore hat.

[RoryOF]

My quick test showed that OpenOffice accepted a file hand edited with XML editor to insert the CDATA section; it opened the file, displaying the text in the CDATA section; Saving the file removed the CDATA bracketing, leaving the enclosed text in the file; I did not examine for inclusion of control characters.

[John_Ha]

I wonder what OpenOffice will do when it finds the unexpected <MyTag>.

Tests I did some time ago showed that AOO ignored tags it didn't know and their enclosed content when the file was opened. When the file was saved the tags and their content were not written back.

[RoryOF]

That is what I found; it may be a shortcoming in the SAX parser OO uses.

[Mountaineer]

Thinking a bit outside Writer, I would suggest html-coding and two different css-styles. You could even use media-queries to show paragraphs on "mobile" and inline-markup for "desktop".

Using xml an xslt-transform should be possible for input to writer - but actually I avoided messing around with this until now.

J.