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

Hi.

On 17/04/2020 15:04, Jason wrote:
> 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.
If there are multiple line breaks between your sections you can get what
you want in 3 passes.
Replace $$ with *-* say (assuming *-* isn't in your text).
Replace $ with "" globally.
Replace *-* with \n

There is bound to be a more elegant solution.
> > > 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.


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