Loss of paragraph formatting in Word

[RogerB]

I have a Word document which was exported from another program. It should
have a 6pt space after each paragraph, but there is no space between
paragraphs. The Format/Paragraph settings show a 6pt space after each
paragraph. There are paragraph marks after each paragraph. If I insert a new
paragraph into the document it has the correct spacing.
If I open the document in Textedit or Pages, the spacing is correct. Can
anyone suggest what is going on and how I can get Word to show the correct
paragraph spacing?
Thanks

 

[Elliott Roper]

I have a Word document which was exported from another program. It should
have a 6pt space after each paragraph, but there is no space between
paragraphs. The Format/Paragraph settings show a 6pt space after each
paragraph. There are paragraph marks after each paragraph. If I insert a new
paragraph into the document it has the correct spacing.
If I open the document in Textedit or Pages, the spacing is correct. Can
anyone suggest what is going on and how I can get Word to show the correct
paragraph spacing?

Try defining a named style with the 6pt after, apply that style to a
paragraph, then hit cmd-space (normal for style). If that works, find
and replace might let you fix the lot.

I'd not recommend this if there was tons of manual formatting applied
to the text.

Run, don't walk, to the MVP web site and download Clive Huggan's /Bend
Word to Your WIll/
http://word.mvps.org/mac/UsingWord-macIndex.html#TakeCharge
is a good place to snag it from.

The stuff on styles is essential reading for anyone lifting text from
other programs.

 

[RogerB]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan document.

 

[CyberTaz]

Since you can open the doc in TextEdit, try using Save As to create an
RTF. See if that behaves better in Word.

If not, what is the source of the doc & what file format is it?

Regards |:>)

 

[RogerB]

Thanks for this. I've reset the compatibility, but it still makes no
difference. Very puzzling!

Under some circumstances, Word will use HTML formatting rules.

This means that if two paragraphs have space below (10 pts) and space above
(6 pts), the resulting space is the greater of the two measurements (10 pts)
not the "sum" (16 pts).

Go into Preferences>Compatibility and see if the document has that option
set. There are quite a few other settings in there that could produce a
similar effect.

You could try setting that dialog to simply the "Word 2004" recommended
options (everything off). The setting is mis-labelled. It's a per-document
dialog, not application-wide. What you set applies only to the current
document. However, if you change the settings and click Default, your
settings then apply to all documents.

Hope this helps

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan document.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Under some circumstances, Word will use HTML formatting rules.

This means that if two paragraphs have space below (10 pts) and space above
(6 pts), the resulting space is the greater of the two measurements (10 pts)
not the "sum" (16 pts).

Go into Preferences>Compatibility and see if the document has that option
set. There are quite a few other settings in there that could produce a
similar effect.

You could try setting that dialog to simply the "Word 2004" recommended
options (everything off). The setting is mis-labelled. It's a per-document
dialog, not application-wide. What you set applies only to the current
document. However, if you change the settings and click Default, your
settings then apply to all documents.

Hope this helps

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan document.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Make a copy of that document, then Select All and Command + Option + q and
Command + spacebar.

That should fix it: if it doesn't, the document is corrupt. See below.

What those commands do is restore ALL formatting in the document back to the
default for the styles that have been applied. After that, any formatting
problems you see MUST be in the style, so you know where to look

The reason for doing this on a "copy" is that if the styles were not
correctly applied, it completely destroys the formatting

If the document is corrupt, in the original copy all except the last
paragraph mark, create a new blank document and paste. This leaves the
corrupted style table behind and the formatting should start to work after
that...

Get back to us if this doesn't work

Thanks for this. I've reset the compatibility, but it still makes no
difference. Very puzzling!

Under some circumstances, Word will use HTML formatting rules.

This means that if two paragraphs have space below (10 pts) and space above
(6 pts), the resulting space is the greater of the two measurements (10 pts)
not the "sum" (16 pts).

Go into Preferences>Compatibility and see if the document has that option
set. There are quite a few other settings in there that could produce a
similar effect.

You could try setting that dialog to simply the "Word 2004" recommended
options (everything off). The setting is mis-labelled. It's a per-document
dialog, not application-wide. What you set applies only to the current
document. However, if you change the settings and click Default, your
settings then apply to all documents.

Hope this helps

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but
it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan
document.

:

I have a Word document which was exported from another program. It should
have a 6pt space after each paragraph, but there is no space between
paragraphs. The Format/Paragraph settings show a 6pt space after each
paragraph. There are paragraph marks after each paragraph. If I insert a
new
paragraph into the document it has the correct spacing.
If I open the document in Textedit or Pages, the spacing is correct. Can
anyone suggest what is going on and how I can get Word to show the correct
paragraph spacing?

Try defining a named style with the 6pt after, apply that style to a
paragraph, then hit cmd-space (normal for style). If that works, find
and replace might let you fix the lot.

I'd not recommend this if there was tons of manual formatting applied
to the text.

Run, don't walk, to the MVP web site and download Clive Huggan's /Bend
Word to Your WIll/
http://word.mvps.org/mac/UsingWord-macIndex.html#TakeCharge
is a good place to snag it from.

The stuff on styles is essential reading for anyone lifting text from
other programs.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[RogerB]

Thanks for this. The Command + Option +q and Command + spacebar didn't work.
However when I remove the last paragraph mark, the document reverts to a
single paragraph (i.e. all the other paragraph marks disappear) and to a
different font and size, but with the 6pt space after.

So this means the original document is corrupt. I'd like to try and
understand why, because it is an export from a writers' programme called
Jer's Novel Writer. I get the same problem with each document I export from
this programme, so there seems to be a problem with the way it treats Word
exports.

If anyone would like a sample Word document to examine, I'll happily send one.

Thanks again

Make a copy of that document, then Select All and Command + Option + q and
Command + spacebar.

That should fix it: if it doesn't, the document is corrupt. See below.

What those commands do is restore ALL formatting in the document back to the
default for the styles that have been applied. After that, any formatting
problems you see MUST be in the style, so you know where to look

The reason for doing this on a "copy" is that if the styles were not
correctly applied, it completely destroys the formatting

If the document is corrupt, in the original copy all except the last
paragraph mark, create a new blank document and paste. This leaves the
corrupted style table behind and the formatting should start to work after
that...

Get back to us if this doesn't work

Thanks for this. I've reset the compatibility, but it still makes no
difference. Very puzzling!

Under some circumstances, Word will use HTML formatting rules.

This means that if two paragraphs have space below (10 pts) and space above
(6 pts), the resulting space is the greater of the two measurements (10 pts)
not the "sum" (16 pts).

Go into Preferences>Compatibility and see if the document has that option
set. There are quite a few other settings in there that could produce a
similar effect.

You could try setting that dialog to simply the "Word 2004" recommended
options (everything off). The setting is mis-labelled. It's a per-document
dialog, not application-wide. What you set applies only to the current
document. However, if you change the settings and click Default, your
settings then apply to all documents.

Hope this helps


On 27/3/06 10:52 PM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "RogerB"

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but
it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan
document.

:

I have a Word document which was exported from another program. It should
have a 6pt space after each paragraph, but there is no space between
paragraphs. The Format/Paragraph settings show a 6pt space after each
paragraph. There are paragraph marks after each paragraph. If I insert a
new
paragraph into the document it has the correct spacing.
If I open the document in Textedit or Pages, the spacing is correct. Can
anyone suggest what is going on and how I can get Word to show the correct
paragraph spacing?

Try defining a named style with the 6pt after, apply that style to a
paragraph, then hit cmd-space (normal for style). If that works, find
and replace might let you fix the lot.

I'd not recommend this if there was tons of manual formatting applied
to the text.

Run, don't walk, to the MVP web site and download Clive Huggan's /Bend
Word to Your WIll/
http://word.mvps.org/mac/UsingWord-macIndex.html#TakeCharge
is a good place to snag it from.

The stuff on styles is essential reading for anyone lifting text from
other programs.

--
To de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$
PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248


--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Roger:

Yeah, OK The document is not actually "corrupt", it simply contains
only ONE paragraph

There's three ways of indicating an "end of paragraph" in Word:

The Unix-style "carriage-return", the Windows-style "carriage return" +
"line feed", and the Word "End-of-paragraph".

Chances are, the other program is sending hexadecimal "0D 0A" (carriage
return and line feed). That's the Windows end-of-paragraph symbol in ASCII.

So Word thinks it's an end-of-paragraph. Unfortunately, it isn't. It's a
carriage return character followed by a line feed.

The "paragraph mark" in Word is not a single character. It's a "container"
that contains as many as several hundred pieces of information (I've never
counted them: it's a lot) that contain all of the formatting properties of
the preceding text. What we see on the screen is just a dummy character
that indicates where the paragraph ends. The actual data stored there is in
binary and can't be represented on screen.

To convert those documents, what I suggest you do is use Find/Replace to
search for whatever it is that's at the end of those paragraphs and replace
it with ^p (that's caret plus lower-case p).

That will cause Word to replace whatever is there with a "real" paragraph
property container, which, among other things, will have a slot to contain
the property "Space after = 6 pts".

Chances are, if you "copy" whatever is at the end of those paragraphs and
paste it into the Find box, Word will find whatever is in the text without
your having to work out what is actually there.

Otherwise, you need to go to each of those paragraph marks and press "Enter"
there, to insert a real paragraph mark that can contain the formatting you
want for those paragraphs.

Hope this helps

Thanks for this. The Command + Option +q and Command + spacebar didn't work.
However when I remove the last paragraph mark, the document reverts to a
single paragraph (i.e. all the other paragraph marks disappear) and to a
different font and size, but with the 6pt space after.

So this means the original document is corrupt. I'd like to try and
understand why, because it is an export from a writers' programme called
Jer's Novel Writer. I get the same problem with each document I export from
this programme, so there seems to be a problem with the way it treats Word
exports.

If anyone would like a sample Word document to examine, I'll happily send one.

Thanks again

Make a copy of that document, then Select All and Command + Option + q and
Command + spacebar.

That should fix it: if it doesn't, the document is corrupt. See below.

What those commands do is restore ALL formatting in the document back to the
default for the styles that have been applied. After that, any formatting
problems you see MUST be in the style, so you know where to look

The reason for doing this on a "copy" is that if the styles were not
correctly applied, it completely destroys the formatting

If the document is corrupt, in the original copy all except the last
paragraph mark, create a new blank document and paste. This leaves the
corrupted style table behind and the formatting should start to work after
that...

Get back to us if this doesn't work

Thanks for this. I've reset the compatibility, but it still makes no
difference. Very puzzling!

:

Under some circumstances, Word will use HTML formatting rules.

This means that if two paragraphs have space below (10 pts) and space above
(6 pts), the resulting space is the greater of the two measurements (10
pts)
not the "sum" (16 pts).

Go into Preferences>Compatibility and see if the document has that option
set. There are quite a few other settings in there that could produce a
similar effect.

You could try setting that dialog to simply the "Word 2004" recommended
options (everything off). The setting is mis-labelled. It's a
per-document
dialog, not application-wide. What you set applies only to the current
document. However, if you change the settings and click Default, your
settings then apply to all documents.

Hope this helps


On 27/3/06 10:52 PM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "RogerB"

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but
it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan
document.

:

I have a Word document which was exported from another program. It
should
have a 6pt space after each paragraph, but there is no space between
paragraphs. The Format/Paragraph settings show a 6pt space after each
paragraph. There are paragraph marks after each paragraph. If I insert a
new
paragraph into the document it has the correct spacing.
If I open the document in Textedit or Pages, the spacing is correct. Can
anyone suggest what is going on and how I can get Word to show the
correct
paragraph spacing?

Try defining a named style with the 6pt after, apply that style to a
paragraph, then hit cmd-space (normal for style). If that works, find
and replace might let you fix the lot.

I'd not recommend this if there was tons of manual formatting applied
to the text.

Run, don't walk, to the MVP web site and download Clive Huggan's /Bend
Word to Your WIll/
http://word.mvps.org/mac/UsingWord-macIndex.html#TakeCharge
is a good place to snag it from.

The stuff on styles is essential reading for anyone lifting text from
other programs.

--
To de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$
PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248


--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[RogerB]

Many thanks for this John. It certainly helps me to understand what is going
on. I'm also in touch with the developer of the software which produces the
Word export, so I hope it will help him also.

Unfortunately copying the end of paragraph mark seems to just put a space in
the find and replace box, so that I get a new paragraph after every word. Is
there any other way of finding out what is actually at the end of each
'paragraph'?

Manually pressing 'enter' does work. Actually the easiest workaround for me
at the moment is to export the document as rtf and then read that into Word.

Thanks again

Roger

Hi Roger:

Yeah, OK The document is not actually "corrupt", it simply contains
only ONE paragraph

There's three ways of indicating an "end of paragraph" in Word:

The Unix-style "carriage-return", the Windows-style "carriage return" +
"line feed", and the Word "End-of-paragraph".

Chances are, the other program is sending hexadecimal "0D 0A" (carriage
return and line feed). That's the Windows end-of-paragraph symbol in ASCII.

So Word thinks it's an end-of-paragraph. Unfortunately, it isn't. It's a
carriage return character followed by a line feed.

The "paragraph mark" in Word is not a single character. It's a "container"
that contains as many as several hundred pieces of information (I've never
counted them: it's a lot) that contain all of the formatting properties of
the preceding text. What we see on the screen is just a dummy character
that indicates where the paragraph ends. The actual data stored there is in
binary and can't be represented on screen.

To convert those documents, what I suggest you do is use Find/Replace to
search for whatever it is that's at the end of those paragraphs and replace
it with ^p (that's caret plus lower-case p).

That will cause Word to replace whatever is there with a "real" paragraph
property container, which, among other things, will have a slot to contain
the property "Space after = 6 pts".

Chances are, if you "copy" whatever is at the end of those paragraphs and
paste it into the Find box, Word will find whatever is in the text without
your having to work out what is actually there.

Otherwise, you need to go to each of those paragraph marks and press "Enter"
there, to insert a real paragraph mark that can contain the formatting you
want for those paragraphs.

Hope this helps

Thanks for this. The Command + Option +q and Command + spacebar didn't work.
However when I remove the last paragraph mark, the document reverts to a
single paragraph (i.e. all the other paragraph marks disappear) and to a
different font and size, but with the 6pt space after.

So this means the original document is corrupt. I'd like to try and
understand why, because it is an export from a writers' programme called
Jer's Novel Writer. I get the same problem with each document I export from
this programme, so there seems to be a problem with the way it treats Word
exports.

If anyone would like a sample Word document to examine, I'll happily send one.

Thanks again

Make a copy of that document, then Select All and Command + Option + q and
Command + spacebar.

That should fix it: if it doesn't, the document is corrupt. See below.

What those commands do is restore ALL formatting in the document back to the
default for the styles that have been applied. After that, any formatting
problems you see MUST be in the style, so you know where to look

The reason for doing this on a "copy" is that if the styles were not
correctly applied, it completely destroys the formatting

If the document is corrupt, in the original copy all except the last
paragraph mark, create a new blank document and paste. This leaves the
corrupted style table behind and the formatting should start to work after
that...

Get back to us if this doesn't work

On 28/3/06 7:00 AM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "RogerB"

Thanks for this. I've reset the compatibility, but it still makes no
difference. Very puzzling!

:

Under some circumstances, Word will use HTML formatting rules.

This means that if two paragraphs have space below (10 pts) and space above
(6 pts), the resulting space is the greater of the two measurements (10
pts)
not the "sum" (16 pts).

Go into Preferences>Compatibility and see if the document has that option
set. There are quite a few other settings in there that could produce a
similar effect.

You could try setting that dialog to simply the "Word 2004" recommended
options (everything off). The setting is mis-labelled. It's a
per-document
dialog, not application-wide. What you set applies only to the current
document. However, if you change the settings and click Default, your
settings then apply to all documents.

Hope this helps


On 27/3/06 10:52 PM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "RogerB"

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Unfortunately the new style
suggestion didn't work. The paragraph settings show a 6pt after space, but
it
doesn't appear in the document. I'll take a look at the Clive Huggan
document.

:

I have a Word document which was exported from another program. It
should
have a 6pt space after each paragraph, but there is no space between
paragraphs. The Format/Paragraph settings show a 6pt space after each
paragraph. There are paragraph marks after each paragraph. If I insert a
new
paragraph into the document it has the correct spacing.
If I open the document in Textedit or Pages, the spacing is correct. Can
anyone suggest what is going on and how I can get Word to show the
correct
paragraph spacing?

Try defining a named style with the 6pt after, apply that style to a
paragraph, then hit cmd-space (normal for style). If that works, find
and replace might let you fix the lot.

I'd not recommend this if there was tons of manual formatting applied
to the text.

Run, don't walk, to the MVP web site and download Clive Huggan's /Bend
Word to Your WIll/
http://word.mvps.org/mac/UsingWord-macIndex.html#TakeCharge
is a good place to snag it from.

The stuff on styles is essential reading for anyone lifting text from
other programs.

--
To de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$
PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248


--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410



--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

There's three ways of indicating an "end of paragraph" in Word:

The Unix-style "carriage-return", the Windows-style "carriage return" +
"line feed", and the Word "End-of-paragraph".

Oh, John... Time for you to get this straight. ;-)

Unix-style is line feed (LF). That's what you get in TextEdit, for example.
(In Word it's used only for "line-endings" that don't end paragraphs; in
Word Mac, as typed with Shift-Return.)

Mac OS-style is traditionally carriage return (CR). In OS X, CR still around
in many apps (mostly legacy apps). That's also used in Word's VBA. It
"appears" to be used in Word itself, but - as you say - it's only
masquerading as a carriage return and really has all the hidden paragraph
info tucked away as well.

Yes, Windows (DOS) has carriage return + line feed (CRLF). That one is
perfectly right.

OS X itself is now mostly agnostic as to line ends. If you paste any text
from anywhere into TextEdit, it treats LF, CR and CRLF _all_ as single
line-ends. (You do not get run-ons with CR nor do you get double-returns
with CRLF. all three of them produce what you'd want - a single line end,
even TextEdit itself makes only LF when you type Return key. Isn't that
smart of it?

This doesn't change anything in your excellent advice, of course. But try to
remember; Unix = LF, Classic Mac = CR, OS X can be either (and won't error
on both).

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.