Removing the space between each paragraph

[Persy]

Hi all. Newbie here.

I initially wrote something in Word, in which I hit "Enter" to start each new paragraph. This means the paragraphs have single line spacing between each of them, like this entry does.

But now I use NeoOffice and would like to know if there is a way to remove the spaces between the paragraphs. So that the entire document looks like a solid block of text (with indents to show new paragraphs), like it would in a novel.

I've done a forum search and can't find anything on the topic that I understand.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

[fabriziovenerandi]

look in paragraph properties if you have setted space before or after the paragraph.

[Persy]

I have looked, and the space setting is at zero.

[iking]

If all you're separating grafs with blank lines, a simple search-and-replace should do the trick. Open up the find-and-replace dilaogue (Cmd-F); click on "more options" and tick the "Regular Expressions" box. Search for ^$ and replace with nothing (leave the replace field blank). The expression ^$ refers to a blank line -- ^ signifies the start of a line, and $ the end. Use Cmd-Z to undo this action if it mangles your work.

The NeoOffice help has a full list of the regex operations and classes that you can use when using regexes to search -- you can access them as part of the find-and-replace's help section.

After you've stripped out the blank lines, you can set the first-line indent for each graf in the Stylist -- no tab characters needed.

HTH,
Ian

[Persy]

I tried that, and it says "search key not found."

[sardisson]

See also this article in the wiki for more find/replace tips.

Smokey

[fabrizio venerandi]

sorry, I have not read that you put the ENTER manually between each paragraph.
This could be a solution:

a) go in TOOL/AUTOCORRECT
b) click in OPTONS tab
c) select REMOVE BLANK PARAGRAPHS
d) go on FORMAT/AUTOFORMAT/APPLY
e) enjoy

[Persy]

It worked! The only problem is that it removes all first line indents. Now the whole document is just one big block of text.

I would like to keep the first line indents, if possible. If not, I will have to go through all the pages and manually indent each paragraph over again.

I am willing to do that, but that's hours of work I would like to avoid if possible.

[ovvldc]

Do all (or most) of these paragraphs have the same paragraph style? In that case you can go to the stylist, and change the style to have some white space before and after each paragraph.

[iking]

[Persy]

Trainman: I am trying to remove the white spaces between the paragraphs, not put them in.

Sentinel: I do know about the pre-made First Line Indent style, but the problem here is that the entire 10 pages are one solid block of text. i.e., the whole doc is just one paragraph. So first line indent only affects the very first line.

Basically, I've managed to remove the spaces b/w the paragraphs using Fabrizio's recommendation. But it's not keeping the text in paragraphs.

This is because I needed to hit Enter twice (when I was first writing in Word) in order to return from the end of a sentence AND start a new paragraph.

So when I check "Remove blank paragraphs" in AutoCorrect and apply, it removes the space both at the end of the sentence AND the white space before the next paragraph. Therefore creating one solid block of text.

It's not looking like a solvable problem...

EDIT: I think I've figured out the problem. It might be because the document is preformatted in Word. I turned on "view nonprinting characters", I saw these weird arrows:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v97/perseph2hades/Misc/Picture2.png

Whereas a new NeoOffice doc I just made has no weird arrows and looks like this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v97/perseph2hades/Misc/Picture1.png

[iking]

The shots do clear things up. From the looks of things, it seems that when the file was in the Word .doc format, the "paragraph breaks" were actually represented in the file as line breaks within one giant paragraph (#$*&!@ Word...), so it's no wonder you ended up with one big mass of text after trying to strip out the whitespace. OTOH, your shot of the file in the NeoOffice .odt format shows paragraph breaks. You should be able to use the fixes suggested above (deleting empty lines or stripping whitespace, followed by styling) after saving your file in the .odt format.

Ian

[amayze]

I recently complained in this post about the fact that NeoOffice regular expressions sometimes mean two different things depending where you use them, however this is exactly the instance when this is useful.

Try doing a search and replace.
Click on More Options... and check the box by Regular Expressions
Search for "\n" - which will match the line breaks in your document - and replace it with "\n" which will insert paragraph breaks in their place.
Now change the search term to "^$" and the replace to "" (nothing) and you will be able to remove of the blank paragraphs in between your text.

Hope that helps.

Andy.

[sardisson]

Wiki'd

Smokey

[Persy]

God bless you guys, Andy, Ian and Smokey.

This worked like a charm. I've effortlessly reformatted all 146 pages of text. I can't even tell you how happy I am!! Yay. Thank you!