Hard return (2003)

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Hi all,

As you can see from the attachment, I have a document with a hard return after each line. I need to get rid of each one so that the sentences wrap around naturally.

Do I have to go through teh entire 96 page document and do it manually, or can all hard returns be removed at once?

Sincerely,

JMT

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That sample is a little unfortunate since the real paragraph breaks are indistiguishable from the ones you need to remove. The closest I can get on that file is to do a search and replace with Wildcards with the following settings…
Find: ^13([a-z])
Replace: {space}1
where the space is an actual character made by a single press of the spacebar.

This will fix the majority of the paragraphs based on the premise that any paragraph that starts with a lowercase character is probably a continuation of the previous paragraph.

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Thanks for that great reply, but for the “find,” do I literally put in “^13([a-z])”? The “find” is saying that no items were found . . .

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Make sure to expand the dialog with the More button and check the box next to “Use wildcards.”

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You can use Format | AutoFormat. It does a reasonable job, but you’d still have to check the entire document for sentences that were missed or treated incorrectly.

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Thanks for these responses, which helped, but what does format/autoformat do? I tried that but it didn’t do anything.

Also, is there a similar way to get rid of the all of these soft returns in the attached document (I don’t know if they are really called soft returns, but they look like little arrows when you press “show/hide formatting”) and replace them with hard returns?

Sincerely,

JMT

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I don’t think you’d want to replace each soft return with a paragraph mark, but pairs of them. This can be done by selecting Edit | Replace, entering ^l^l (hat lowercase L hat lowercase L) in the Find what box and ^p (hat p) in the Replace with box, then clicking Replace All.

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If I position the insertion point at the beginning of the doc from the first post, then select Format | AutoFormat and click OK, I get the attached result.

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Wow! Autoformat is great! Let me try one more: what if I were to take the attached document, and wanted to get rid of all those little circles that are in the beginning of each section (you have ot turn on show/hide formatting)? What are those circles? If I go into Find&Replace, what is the code I put in for those circles so that it catches only those and not normal spaces?

Sincerely,

JMT

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Those circles are “no-break” spaces. If you put one between two words, Word treats the combination like one word and won’t put the first word on the end of a line and the second on the next line. I use it a lot to prevent a break in a first name – second name combination. The code for this is ^s (hat s).

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