Re: [libreoffice-users] anyone knows how to find/replace not-printable glyphs?

Tim---Kracked_P_P---webmaster wrote:

> I have a problem with a old book text file.  There are 3 or more lines 
> between paragraphs.  I want to reduce them down to only one.
>
> When I turned the option to view non-printed characters, I get the 
> "PI-ish" looking symbol - ¶ - that is at the end of every paragraph.  
> Each extra line has that symbol as its first character.  The character 
> listed in the last line of this text looks like the non-printing 
> character, but must be different from it, since it gives a "no match 
> found" error when using it.
>
> So, is there a way to use that end of paragraph symbol/character to look 
> for three in a row and replace it with only two?  Since some of the 
> paragraphs have more than 3 extra lines between paragraphs, I could run 
> that find/replace several times.  All I want to show is the symbol at 
> the end of the paragraph and the one between paragraphs.  Since there 
> are at least 300 pages to the book - in text format - it would not be 
> practicable to do this manually.
>
> Actually, I am trying to fix a bad .epub book.  I found that if I 
> convert it to a text file and the convert it back to an e-book format, 
> most of the formatting issues go away when viewing it with my tablet's 
> .epub readers [Nook and Pocketbook].
>
> So has anyone tried to do something like this, removing blank 
> paragraphs, i.e. blank lines between paragraphs, as an automatic 
> find/replace option?

As you mention in your last paragraph, it is about blank paragraphs. It is not blank lines between 
paragraphs. These come from the bad practice to insert so called "blank lines" as paragraph 
separators, but as you correctly observe, they are additional blank paragraphs. The proper way to 
get spacing between paragraphs is to set additional space after the paragraph with Format > 
Paragraph.

To get rid of the blank paragraph, use Edit > Find and Replace, Click Other options, and check 
Regular expressions. In the search field enter ^$

Now you can find/replace the empty paragraphs.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet@vanoostrum.org>
WWW: http://pietvanoostrum.com/
PGP key: [8DAE142BE17999C4]


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