Removing paragraph breaks
Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2012 9:24 pm
I use OpenOffice on a Windows 7 machine.
I want to import text from Adobe Acrobat, but it comes up with a million paragraph marks that I need to search and destroy.
There's a FAQ about it, which doesn't work. The FAQ says to search for "^$" and replace with a space. But that doesn't work. Open OFfice tells me that it can't find the text being sought. But there are a million of them in plain sight.
Below is a copy of the FAQ I found, which doesn't work, just FYI. Thanks for your help.
How do I remove a large number of hard returns from text that were pasted into my document (for example, from an email message)?
Checked for technical accuracy TJ 03:26, 3 January 2009 (CET)
Follow these steps:
Select Edit -> Find & Replace.
Click on the More Options button to open the full dialog.
Near the bottom left of the dialog, select the Regular Expressions check box.
In the Search for field, type:
^$
This regular expression says to search for a paragraph marker '$' at the beginning of a paragraph - programmer terms for an empty paragraph. ^$ finds empty paragraphs, i.e., a carriage return with no text, i.e., the second of two consecutive returns with no intervening text. Use
$
(without the caret) to find hard returns, common in plain text documents, emails, etc.
Click on the Find button.
To replace the hard return with a space character, type a space in the Replace with field, then click the Replace button.
To replace the hard return with nothing (remove the character), click the Replace button (without entering anything in the Replace with field).
If you have many hard returns to replace, you can also use the Replace All button. It is wise to save your document prior to using this option, in case it behaves unexpectedly.
I want to import text from Adobe Acrobat, but it comes up with a million paragraph marks that I need to search and destroy.
There's a FAQ about it, which doesn't work. The FAQ says to search for "^$" and replace with a space. But that doesn't work. Open OFfice tells me that it can't find the text being sought. But there are a million of them in plain sight.
Below is a copy of the FAQ I found, which doesn't work, just FYI. Thanks for your help.
How do I remove a large number of hard returns from text that were pasted into my document (for example, from an email message)?
Checked for technical accuracy TJ 03:26, 3 January 2009 (CET)
Follow these steps:
Select Edit -> Find & Replace.
Click on the More Options button to open the full dialog.
Near the bottom left of the dialog, select the Regular Expressions check box.
In the Search for field, type:
^$
This regular expression says to search for a paragraph marker '$' at the beginning of a paragraph - programmer terms for an empty paragraph. ^$ finds empty paragraphs, i.e., a carriage return with no text, i.e., the second of two consecutive returns with no intervening text. Use
$
(without the caret) to find hard returns, common in plain text documents, emails, etc.
Click on the Find button.
To replace the hard return with a space character, type a space in the Replace with field, then click the Replace button.
To replace the hard return with nothing (remove the character), click the Replace button (without entering anything in the Replace with field).
If you have many hard returns to replace, you can also use the Replace All button. It is wise to save your document prior to using this option, in case it behaves unexpectedly.