Style selection oddity

[Bob]

Howdy,

I have a document which doesn't seem to let me change the style of one
paragraph without them all changing together. If select the paragraph
(say, the second in the document), then double click on a style in the
formatting palette, nothing happens. If instead I change tabs in the
tab bar, the first paragraph also takes those tab settings.

Now, if I have the left sidebar visible that tells me which paragraph
is which style, it has "normal" next to the first paragraph, and
nothing next to the second. I think this is a clue. If I position at
the start of the second paragrpah and type <return>, now I get a blank
line above the 2nd paragraph (with no style in the sidebar), and the
second paragraph now is called "normal" in the sidebar.

This makes me think that the two paragraphs were somehow one paragraph
in the eyes of Word. This in spite of their being a page break between
them!

Now, this document was originally created as an import from a web page
(I am using this method because it is easier to insert 240 images, with
scaling, via html than by cut and paste). My html looks like this:

Title A<br><br><img ...>
#
Title B<br><br><img ...>

And shortly after opening it I replace # with ^m to get a page break
(because I want my images on separate pages). Even though I've got
something like 6 different lines which I'd like to be separate
paragraphs, Word seems to be thinking of them as a single paragraph.

Anyone have any ideas? Is there a better way to do this? is there
something I can put into the html to convince Word that I want a page
break? <div> seemed to work sometimes but not other times. Is there
some otpion that I need to turn off that says "use the same style for
this paragraph as the previous one"?

Thanks for any help,
Bob H

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

What version of Word?

One approach: replace # with ^p^m to get a paragraph break and a page
break.

 

[Bob]

It's Word 2004 for Mac, version 11.0 (040408).

Thanks for the ^p suggestion. I've solved the problem using the <p>
tag in html. The key concept was that I didn't realize paragraphs
could contain line breaks and page breaks. Prior to that my thinking
was that <br> corresponded to a paragraph. Which would be silly,
because the <p> tag is by definition a paragraph.

Thanks,
Bob H

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Okay, glad you found a solution. I don't totally understand your solution,
but I've never imported a webpage into Word, so.....

<br> in html would be roughly equivalent to a line break in Word (^l in
Find)

Putting a page break inside a paragraph is a tad sketchy‹MacWord tries not
to let you do it, because it's been linked to problems. If you Insert a
Page Break into the middle of the paragraph, Word does add a paragraph mark
and make it two paragraphs, automatically. But if you create the page break
by using Find & Replace, that paragraph mark doesn't get added.

 

[Bob]

I don't totally understand your solution,

but I've never imported a webpage into Word, so.....

It's not an ideal solution, but it works. The underlying problem is
that I have 240 images to stick into a Word document. Each of these
images needs to be scaled by exactly 24%, and should be "in line with
text". It would be extremely tedious to paste these into word by hand.
That would be true even if as pasted they came in correctly formatted,
but it seems that a typical paste puts the image in at 100% (naturally)
and "in front of text" (which I oughta be able to override 'cause I
never want that). So each paste would take 10 seconds, which would
come to 40 minutes total. Assuming I got them all in in the correct
order and didn't screw something up.

So how do you solve that? I thought maybe apple script but it's been
at least 5 years since I've doen anything in apple script so I'd have
the renewed learning curve. Plus I'm not sure where to find
info/samples on how to script Word (have never scripted it). So I came
up with the html version. An easy python script creates the
rahter-bare html with links to all my images with sizes set
apprpriately. Then I open that with Word (as a webpage), select all,
copy, and paste it into my real document.

It seems to work fine, though I can't figure out how to get tab
characters into the html (and be recognized as such by word). Thus I
use a # character and tell word to replace all of them with ^t.

Things are fine and dandy now, I've solved it and am moving on.

Thanks for your help,
Bob H