Find/replace special characters (97)

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Hi folks! I have this problem that I can’t seem to solve:
I have a big text, many pages. I want to get the document smaller, so I made some minor adjustments: made the font smaller and broke the text in 3 column, by this somehow reducing the number of pages that I have. Somebody told me that I could maybe get rid of the special character (paragraph mark) which one can view with Ctrl-* if I could paste this sign in the Find/Replace box, and simply replace it with a space. This way I would not have many paragraphs having one extra line between them, since particularly for this text I wouldn’t need that. The problem is, however, that I cannot paste this special character into the Find/Replace box. I even tried with the ascii code (Alt+ something), but I could not find it there. I also tried to insert symbols, still I could not copy it to the Find/Replace. Anyone has an idea of how to get rid of these empty lines between the paragraphs without having to go through each of them separately, as I am talking about over 100 pages here having +4 paragraphs each…
Also does anyone have some other tips of how can I make this document even smaller?

TIA,
K.

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You should be able to remove the extra paragraph markers by going into Find/Replace, then clicking on More. Click on Special and choose Paragraph Mark (I think near the top). In the Replace With option, just type in a space. Remember that this will get rid of ALL return marks in your document-so it will be all one paragraph when you’re done. If you have a lot of double returns in your document, you can reduce them to one return by replacing two paragraph marks with one.

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Thanks for your reply, it does help me. It’s an internal document, so it doesn’t matter if it all looks like a big paragraph, in this case really reducing the number of the pages is important.
I didn’t realise the Find/Replace has all these extra options, I will next explore all of them, as they seem very useful indeed!
Cheers,
K.

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If you want to get rid of just the extra lines, you can search for two paragraph marks and replace with one. That way you still have some breaks for the reader.

And you can insert the mark directly from the keyboard into the find/replace boxes. It’s just ^p (shift-6, then lowercase p).

Lin

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One idea would be to reduce the page margins. You could reduce them from 2.5cm to 2cm and not really notice much difference in readability.

Another idea is to reduce the line spacing for each paragraph. E.G. If using 12pt text, a spacing change to ‘Exactly, 10pt’ is still very readable.

Is your printer capable of duplex (double-sided) printing?

– to anyone who’s saving a tree or two.

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Here’s another idea: Try using a smaller font (as opposed to a smaller font size). For example, using a given point size, Garamond is fairly large, but Times New Roman is much smaller (vertically as well as horizontally). And there’s always a “condensed” or “narrow” font (like Arial Narrow).

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