formatting the text

L

lalka01

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel I copy pasted a text from pdf file, but I have problems with weird formatting.

The text has strange spaces between words and it takes a lot of time to delete each and every additional space between the words since the text has 10 pages!!!

Is there any possibility to do it automatically?
 
J

John McGhie

Let me guess... You have copied "Justified" text from a PDF.

When Word "justifies" text, it inserts variable width spaces between the
words to enable the line to be justified by expanding the spaces.

When you paste from PDF, Adobe makes sure that most formatting is stripped
(they want to make it as difficult as possible to edit a PDF, because that's
their purpose). So variable width spaces would be replaced by the
equivalent number of fixed-width spaces.

You can get them all out in one hit using Find/Replace.

Find two spaces and replace with one space. Run this several times, until
it tells you it made only "one" replacement.

With practice, you can speed this up a bit: start with three spaces to one,
then two spaces to one. Starting with an odd number, then an even number,
will half the number of passes you have to make.

Cheers


Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel I
copy pasted a text from pdf file, but I have problems with weird formatting.

The text has strange spaces between words and it takes a lot of time to delete
each and every additional space between the words since the text has 10
pages!!!

Is there any possibility to do it automatically?

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
 

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