On Sun, 2005-04-10 at 14:32, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 06:13 +1000, Jeff Shrowder wrote:
G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
On Sun, 2005-04-10 at 06:26 +1000, Jeff Shrowder wrote:
G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 13:38 +0100, A. Beal wrote:
Dear Friends,
I am currently using Open Office 1.1.4 and although it is generally very good, the 'Find & Replace' function seems very limited. I tried to use it to strip out unnecessary paragraph breaks (carriage returns), which can easily be done using 'Find and Replace' with most wordprocessors. However I could not find a way to get Open Office to search for paragraph breaks. I tried Regular Expressions but the list in Help does not include paragraph breaks - and using the standard Regular Expression for a paragraph break (/r) did not work (it simply found the letter 'r'.
Am I missing something, or is this part of Open Office as limited as it appears? (Compare it with WordPerfect which allows all kinds of things to be searched for and replaced.)
Thanks for any help you can offer.
Yours,
Alasdair Beal
FAQ item, see http://documentation.openoffice.org/faqs/word_processing/016.html
The shortcoming with this is that it only removes paragraph breaks, not line breaks, which are a different character. It doesn't rewrap text which is what I understand the OP wants to achieve.
Rewrap you achieve in other ways. If indeed the OP is talking about soft returns, it means that these have been inserted by other means as importing plain text makes paragraph breaks of line terminations be they CR-LF combos or simply LFs. In any case, one can use regex to convert these too.
Can you please tell me how. I've found the apparent lack of this feature a real pain. If there's a simple way of rewrapping imported text it's not obvious e.g. a menu item such as Edit > Rewrap Text or Format > Rewrap Text.
The list of regular expressions in OOo Help doesn't address that "line break"/rewrap situation.
I would suggest that to format the text after removing paragraph breaks ome should select the text and use Format > Default.
I tried that too. No dice. Unfortunately, I'm still no further advanced in solving this problem.
I'll try but I am working only by guessing what you are seeing. So ...
You import a text file like an email message into OOo. This leaves paragraph markers at the end of every line. I would expect that each paragraph is separated by a paragraph marker. Highlight the message. Now you enter into the find field of Find&Replace the charater $. In the replace field you enter say a space. Next you select Replace all and what you should have is text that is more or less formatted. You may have to re-insert paragraph markers between paragraphs depending on the imported text.
You may want to have the standard font so at this point, highlight the text again and select Format > Default. This should do the job. If not, then open the stylist and select the Default paragraph style.
For soft returns which are indicated by the bent arrow in OOo, you have
to use a regex feature. I think that soft returns are the carriage
return character (0x0a in hex but they could be returns (0x0d in hex)).
In this case, enter \x000a in the find field and enter whatever you want
in the Replace field, for example, $ to create a paragraph, highlight
the text that is to be fixed, select Regular expressions and click
Replace all.
These instructions may or may not be complete but I am certain they will help you get started.
Be sure to choose "Regular expressions" in the Find & Replace dialog box. Then "$" strips off all end of line return characters. In my test, it did not strip returns where the user intended them, perhaps because in this case there are actually two returns. "^$" strips blank lines, and "\n" strips soft returns.
Ted Tripp
Thanks for your help - more useful stuff to add to my off-line help file :-) See my other responses on this thread. BTW I did have Regular expressions checked in the F&R dialog box. I'm nearly bald from tearing my hair out, but you and GRS have saved my beard :-)
Cheers,
Jeff ------------------------ Windows are a pane
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