text wrap

[brinded]

I've copied text from an email, and pasted it into a word document.
(Word X, service release 1)

The line breaks are a mess and I'm having problems re-formatting.

I've tried 'paste special'/'unformatted text' but it keeps the line
breaks.

I've tried search and replace using ^p^p to ^p and also ^l to " " (a
space, without the quotes) - as suggested elsewhere on this forum.

What I end up with are square shaped symbols in the text which seem to
represent the ^p but cannot be searched/replaced.I could go through
the document and delete these, but that would defeat the point of the
previous effort.

Is there no way to have 'autoformat' do this? Or some other process?

btw I saw another post that mentions buttons on the clipboard, but I
don't think that applies to Word X. At least I don't see any on my
clipboard.

thanks in advance.

 

[John McGhie]

Yes, you are correct. You do not get the Paste Options Buttons in Word X.
But they would not help you if you did...

What you have is an email formatted with Hard Line Breaks. Word is
substituting these into new paragraphs when it pastes (as it should).

The square hollow symbols are "undisplayable characters". They are probably
Unicode symbols that Word X can't understand. If you had Word 2004, it
could probably display them, but it wouldn't help.

Chances are they are Unix or Windows "line ending characters" (either
carriage returns or new line characters). Either way, you can delete them,
you just can't backspace over them. Select them and choose Cut and they
will go.

Because you are in Word X, you can't search for them. Which is a pain,
because it's screwing up you attempt to re-wrap the text.

Copy the text from your email and paste it into Entourage. Select the text
and click the "Re-wrap Text" button. That will fix it.

Cheers

I've copied text from an email, and pasted it into a word document.
(Word X, service release 1)

The line breaks are a mess and I'm having problems re-formatting.

I've tried 'paste special'/'unformatted text' but it keeps the line
breaks.

I've tried search and replace using ^p^p to ^p and also ^l to " " (a
space, without the quotes) - as suggested elsewhere on this forum.

What I end up with are square shaped symbols in the text which seem to
represent the ^p but cannot be searched/replaced.I could go through
the document and delete these, but that would defeat the point of the
previous effort.

Is there no way to have 'autoformat' do this? Or some other process?

btw I saw another post that mentions buttons on the clipboard, but I
don't think that applies to Word X. At least I don't see any on my
clipboard.

thanks in advance.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[brinded]

Thanks again John,

I've tried the entourage route, as suggested - but the version I'm
using (10.1.6) only has 'Edit/ Auto Text Cleanup/ Rewrap Paragraphs,'
which manages to leave the line wraps untouched.

I'm resigned to the old fashioned 'search and peck' method.

regards, dg

 

[Russ]

Dg,
You could try cutting and pasting all your clips into a 'dumber' or simpler
text editor like TextEdit. But if all you see is one long line for each clip
don't despair. Look in TextEdit's Format menu. When you are done clipping,
save the file. That should clean the text of odd characters.
The file should be plain text. Reopen in Word and try to autoformat or
word-wrap the long lines. Hit return to put paragraph marks where they make
the most sense.

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/CleanWebText.htm
http://www.selznick.com/products/smartwrap/mac/index.htm
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8974
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22129
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/services.html