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List:       openoffice-discuss
Subject:    Re: "What is MS-Works?"
From:       Shez <gmane () xerez ! demon ! co ! uk>
Date:       2004-11-29 21:19:41
Message-ID: jL7yBrEtJ5qBFwbO () gmane-enamg ! uk
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On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon wrote:
>I've received a batch of 307 files that an acquaintance apparently used
>"MS-Works" to create.
....
> the 307 files I'm working with have two hard returns after each and
>every sentence!  It's a horrible mess to work with, and so I'm
>wondering if anyone has any advice on how to better convert files in
>the .wps format (MS-Works) into something more useable, like .doc or
>rtf.  And those double hard returns... is that something the Works
>software creates or did the author of these files I'm working with
>actually input those (hard to believe).

Unless Word's import filter does something really weird, he must have
input them as two carriage returns. Certainly exporting Works .wps files
to .rtf doesn't introduce such artefacts. I think a lot of people never
really learn how to use the formatting features of word processors, I
certainly know people who press return twice in Word to get gaps between
paragraphs (and some of these people have degrees!)

OOo can be tricky when it comes to searches involving paragraph
boundaries, however you should be able to strip out the extra returns by
doing a regular expression search for blank paragraphs (use ^$ ) and
replacing them with an empty string. Alternatively if your friend still
has Works, he could convert his pairs of returns to single ones (search
^P^P, replace with ^P) and then set the paragraph spacing to add a line
after each paragraph, which is presumably the effect he wanted to
achieve.

-Shez.
-- 
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