please help: merging multiple consecutive text lines into one Wordparagraph

[John Goche]

Hello,

I have an ASCII text (.txt) file in DOS format with each text line
terminated by a carriage return character and line feed character.
Inside the text file, paragraphs consist of consecutive nonblank
lines and are separated by one or more blank lines. When I open
the file with Microsoft Word 2007 the line delimeters seem to
persist since if I highlight a paragraph and try to justify the
text so that both the right hand side and left hand side of
the text are align, Word just justifies each line individually,
that is, does nothing since each line by itself is by definition
already justified. Thus I would like to eliminate all line delimiters
appearing between nonempty lines. I could delete them one at a
time, but this would be time consuming as some of the paragraphs
in the original text file have quite a lot of lines. I would prefer it
if there
were a way to be able to highlight a bunch of consecutive nonempty
lines and delete all line delimiters (i.e. invisible delimiting
characters)
found therein by pressing a "merge lines into paragraph" button or
something similar from within Word. This would have the effect of
merging the highlighted lines into a proper Word paragraph. Is
there a way to do this in Word?

Thanks a lot for all your help,

John Goche

 

[Jay Freedman]

See http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/CleanWebText.htm. (It doesn't matter
whether the text comes from the Web or elsewhere; the steps are the same.)

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[John Goche]

Seehttp://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/CleanWebText.htm. (It doesn't matter
whether the text comes from the Web or elsewhere; the steps are the same.)

Thank you for your response. In Microsoft Word 2003 SP3 I opened the
text
document and did the following. First I right clicked on the toolbars
section
right under the menu bar to make sure that the standard toolbar was
toggled
on so that it is displayed. Then I clicked on the downwards arrow
found
on the far right of the standard toolbar, selected "Add or Remove
Buttons",
then selected "Standard", and then made sure the "Show All" button was
displayed by ensuring that a checkmark appeared next to it. Once the
button was visible on the standard toolbar I clicked on it. This
displayed
the line breaks as arrows shaped like the drawing appearing on the
enter key of most physical computer keyboards. Then under the
Edit menu I selected "Replace..." and under "Find what:" I
entered ^l^l and then under "Replace with:" I entered ^p^p
and then clicked on "Replace All". Then I selected "Replace..."
once again from the Edit menu and under "Find what:"
I entered ^l and under "Replace with:" I entered " " (a space)
and then clicked on "Replace All". Then I selected "Select All"
from the "Edit" menu and hit the justify button from the
Formatting toolbar.

This did it for me.

Thanks for your help,

John Goche