removing blank lines

[Marianne]

Hello.

I have four large (four hundred plus pages each) documents, single-spaced,
which I originally formatted as justified paragraphs, no indentation, and a
blank line between each paragraph or line of dialogue. At first the format
pleased me, but now I want these babies to appear more novel-ready. I found,
through the help menu, a way to indent the first line of each paragraph or
line of dialogue. I'm finding no method to remove those extra blank lines.
I did go into Format: Paragraph: Spacing and try to set the before and after
to 0 point. No change.

Does anyone have a method to automatically omit those extra blank lines? If
so, I will hail you and be moved to send candy. If there's no way to remove
all that now unwanted white space, and I'm forced to go back and delete,
delete, delete, then I'll count it as penance for formatting poorly to begin
with.

Happily, this fifth manuscript has its single spaces, no extra blank lines,
and a neat little quarter inch indentation that inserts itself whenever I hit
"enter" so I'm good to go from now on. But the idea of fixing those others
is daunting.

Help?

thanks,
~Marianne

 

[Beth Melton]

If the blank lines were created by pressing Enter two times then they
are actually empty paragraphs and you can use Find/Replace to correct
this by finding all occurrences of two paragraph marks and replacing
them with a single paragraph mark.

- Press F5 to open the Find/Replace dialog box
- Select the Replace tab
- In the Find What text box type: ^p^p
- In the Replace With text box type: ^p
- Replace All

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Marianne]

Beth, you are a goddess! Thank you! I used your suggested path and after a
good solid two minutes time, nearly eight thousand "changes" had been made,
and whizbang the document went from four hundred nineteen pages to two sixty
six.

Now, do you prefer milk chocolate? Or dark?

~Marianne

 

[Beth Melton]

I'm glad you were able to fix things up quickly! That's a lot of extra
paragraph marks!

Also, if you ever do want to include space between the paragraphs then
using Format/Paragraph and the Space Before or After is the way to go
rather than using an empty paragraph mark. It's so much easier to
control and easy to adjust the amount of space as well.

As for the chocolate, that's SO generous of you but honestly, not
necessary at all - I'm just glad to have been able to help.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/