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Removing repeated paragraph breaks after pasting from PDF
Auteur du fil: adrienneiii
adrienneiii
adrienneiii
États-Unis
Local time: 15:49
espagnol vers anglais
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Aug 1, 2012

Hello there, can anyone tell me how to do this? After pasting from the particular document I'm working on now, it's worse than usual - ie. a paragraph break after every word, rather than every line as seen in the PDF document. Yet when I try my trusted method of Find>^p, Replace with a space, it doesn't find those paragraph breaks. The same is the case in Windows notepad and OpenOffice Writer, so that would indicate that these are possibly not normal paragraph breaks, though they do look like th... See more
Hello there, can anyone tell me how to do this? After pasting from the particular document I'm working on now, it's worse than usual - ie. a paragraph break after every word, rather than every line as seen in the PDF document. Yet when I try my trusted method of Find>^p, Replace with a space, it doesn't find those paragraph breaks. The same is the case in Windows notepad and OpenOffice Writer, so that would indicate that these are possibly not normal paragraph breaks, though they do look like them....

Any ideas, to save me a lot of work?

Thanks so much. ▲ Collapse
 
Tony M
Tony M
France
Local time: 00:49
Membre
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Some ideas Aug 2, 2012

You say that they "look like" ordinary paragraph marks — so I assume you are using 'display hidden characters' to see them? Are you sure they are not 'manual line returns' instead? I wouldn't expect so, as in my experience, PDF usually does indeed add 'hard paragraph' marks. However, after you have done your search-&-replace, are they still visible? That I find rather more surprising!

Could it be that in fact there are no longer paragraph breaks as such, but that the PDF ha... See more
You say that they "look like" ordinary paragraph marks — so I assume you are using 'display hidden characters' to see them? Are you sure they are not 'manual line returns' instead? I wouldn't expect so, as in my experience, PDF usually does indeed add 'hard paragraph' marks. However, after you have done your search-&-replace, are they still visible? That I find rather more surprising!

Could it be that in fact there are no longer paragraph breaks as such, but that the PDF has come through with narrow margins set, which are forcing the text to move onto a new line? I've not eprsonally had this problem when actually copying/pasting from PDF, but you DO get it sometimes with OCR programs, which have a nasty habit of creating unwanted columns all over the place!

Could you perhaps try 'select all' and then from the styles dropdown, select 'clear all formatting' — or alternatively, paste it in again using 'paste special' > 'unformatted text'.

By all means feel free to send me your doc, or an extract from it, and I can take a look at if for you if you wish. ▲ Collapse
 
esperantisto
esperantisto  Identity Verified
Local time: 01:49
Membre (2006)
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Show the file Aug 2, 2012

Unless you share the problematic file, any speculation on the subject will be useless.
 
adrienneiii
adrienneiii
États-Unis
Local time: 15:49
espagnol vers anglais
+ ...
AUTEUR DU FIL
Thanks for your replies Aug 3, 2012

Hello there, gentlemen, thanks for trying to help. I still don't know what caused this issue - I've never had any difficulty replacing paragraph marks with spaces before. But I've managed to get the file in Word format from my client, which makes everything a lot easier. So it's academic now.

Thanks again!
 


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Removing repeated paragraph breaks after pasting from PDF






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