Formatting a document to reduce blank space between paragraph marks

[Malik Al-Amin]

Is there a way to loop through a document and move the paragrahp marks
closer to the end of the text? We have a document with many extra spaces
between it and the paragraph mark and it's causing problems for our system
here. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Jezebel]

Not clear whether you mean horizontal or vertical space.

Horizontal: use Find and replace. Search for ^w^p and replace with ^p

Vertical: set the SpaceBefore and SpaceAfter values for the paragraph
styles.

 

[fumei]

Uh, the best solution is to have NO extra paragraph marks between paragraphs.
Properly used, paragraphs in Word should always use Styles, and by
definition, the spaces are defined to be whatever you want them to be.

Use Styles and you will never have this problem again.

 

[Steven Marzuola]

fumei,

That's great. But all too often many of us have to work with
documents created by other people, over whom we have no control.

I'm a technical translator and I receive Word documents from my
customers almost every day. Some aren't bad, some are nightmares.
Almost every one of them uses two paragraph marks between paragraphs
instead of one. That's easy to fix. What I usually do is modify
the Normal style to put 10 or 12 points after each paragraph, then
search and replace two paragraph marks (^p^p) with just one (^p).

Other example include: Users who make "tables" by pressing the tab
key and spacebar, instead of creating proper Word tables. Documents
with a mix of automatic and manually entered page numbers and
bullets. Manually generated Tables of Contents, no use of Heading
styles. And the list goes on.

My translations don't look that way.

Steven