Re: [libreoffice-users] Re-flow text in Writer

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 02:58:12AM +0100, Brian Barker composed:
> At 18:00 16/04/2020 -0500, Jason Noname wrote:
> > Is there a way to force text to reflow in Writer?
>
> Text reflows automatically.
>
> > Say I have a file with hard wraps at the end of each line and I want to
> > reflow all the paragraphs.
>
> You mean that you want to *join* existing paragraphs, so that the entire
> (selected) text becomes a single paragraph?

I suppose that's what I wanted, I just didn't quite know how to ask the 
question because the problematic document had multiple text sections 
(separated by an empty line) which should have been paragraphs but each 
line ended with a 'carriage return'; what I needed was to eliminate the 
'carriage returns' (I guess properly called paragraph breaks) within 
those text sections. Basically, converting each text section to a proper 
paragraph.
 
> o Search for $ .
> o Replace with nothing.
> You will need to have "Regular expressions" ticked, of course.
>
> This will do exactly what you ask, so that paragraphs are joined without
> anything in between. In practice, you may wish to replace with a single
> space instead of nothing.
>
> Note that if you have empty paragraphs in your text, these will be removed -
> but they will prevent paragraphs preceding and following them from being
> merged. You could merely repeat the same Find & Replace, but that will
> duplicate the spaces, if you have included them. Instead, first replace $
> with space and then replace $ with nothing.

Searching for $ and replacing with space works, except that I have to do 
it selectively on each section--doing Replace All on the whole document 
lumps everything into one giant paragraph.
> > Or alternately is there a way to find and replace line breaks (searching
> > for '\n' does not seem to work)?
>
> This is not an alternative to your other question but a different
> requirement. If you indeed have line breaks, \n will match them. But
> paragraph breaks are not line breaks, and \n will not match paragraph
> breaks.
Okay, I guess I didn't understand the difference between line breaks and 
paragraph breaks; the ones I was interested in were the ones created by 
pressing Enter.

> I trust this helps.

It does, thank you.

-- 
Jason


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