SoftMaker.com

The title of this thread is perhaps a bit misleading, but basically what I would like to know is the following:

When I convert text from a different format (say, PDF) to a TM or Word document format, I often get these 'loose' line paragraphs. That is, the text has the appearance of a paragraph (there is line space above and below the 'paragraphs') but every line of text in the 'paragraph' is disconnected or standing on its own, so it's impossible to justify the text. I can left align it, right-align, and center it, but I cannot justify it, as when I try the text stays the same as left-aligned.

I do not know the correct terminology for this; whether this is called "breaking spaces" or "wrapping" or what, but for years I have been running into this problem, intermittently.

I have tried to apply nonbreaking spaces, etc, (from Word) but I cannot seem to get rid of these separated lines.

Is there any way to automate such ill-formatted paragraphs with TextMaker? What I am looking for is a way to unify the lines of text, so that the paragraphs can be justified.

Thanks,

Patrick

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

BTW, I found out that in some ways the similarity of .docx saved in non-compatible mode (by Word 2010) and .tmd (TextMaker) is closer than .docx documents saved in compatible mode by Word 2010.

I noticed this because when saved in compatible mode by Word, the spacing between either lines or paragraphs is greater, making the document a bit larger/longer, whereas the document saved in non-compatible mode by Word is very close in length to a .tmd document as saved by TextMaker 2012.

That's not a complaint, I like that But just an interesting thing I noticed. Since TextMaker handles .docx in non-compatible mode as well it does anyway, whenever I do work with Word 2010 I now know to use non-compatible mode.

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

Obviously, the texts you converted from PDF have paragraph breaks at the end of lines where they shouldn't have ones. You can easily check this by clicking the green paragraph icon in the uppermost toolbar to show all non-printing characters.

To remove these unwanted paragraph breaks, use Edit > Replace.... Insert a paragraph break in the "Search for" field (click the "Special" button). If there are blank spaces before the paragraph signs at the end of the lines (indicated by small black dots), leave the "Replace with" field empty. If not, insert a space.

In your text there will probably be "real" paragraphs you will want to keep. They are indicated by double paragraph breaks. To make your work easier (especially in long texts), do three "Replace all" runs for the whole text:
#1 Replace all double paragraph breaks with some out-of-the way character combination ("zxy" or something like that).
#2 Replace all paragraph breaks with spaces or nothing (depends, see above).
#3 Replace all "zxy" with paragraph breaks.

Thanks, Jossi, but this didn't help. It also took forever on just a 33 page document, single spaced, simple 12p pt TMR font document.

I then tried selecting only a section and apply "Non Breaking Spaces" and TextMaker was busy for over a minute, and then quit responding. With 8gb of ram and 4.5 ghz quad core this seems like a bit of a problem

It seems to be just a matter of non-connecting lines. A new lines begins, but it's really part of the previous line. So it's like typing half a sentence, and then performing 'enter' and writing the rest of the sentence on the next line. The word processor sees these as two separate lines of text. What I need is some way to automate connecting these lines. In the past I used to backspace the previous line to connect it to the line above, thus making one sentence. But in larger documents this is exhausting.

I have a little text editor someone made years ago that can take care of this problem, but if I use it, it gets rid of ALL formatting, including bold text, paragraphs, etc.

Thanks

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

Could you give us a sample file? I'd like to have a look and see what's exactly wrong with these files.

Just any text will do. Like this:

I was telling you about lines that are
not seen as separate lines. Just like
I'm doing right now. As you can see
this has the appearances of lines; but
when you copy and paste this into
TextMaker or any word processor,
how do you make it so that TM will
connect these 'loose' lines into
complete sentences?

It doesn't seem to matter how long the lines are; in fact, in the text I extracted from the pdf's I mentioned it will have the appearance of completely lines, but when you try to apply Justified on it, you'll see it won't work.

Thanks for the help

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

Just as I thought. When you copy and paste your sample text into TextMaker, you get this:

Now click on the paragraph icon in the toolbar - this one:
What you will see is this:

The characters at the end of each line are line breaks (not paragraph breaks as I thought).
Remove them (manually or by "Search and replace" as described above) and: Bingo!

Well, two things:

1) The pdf converted document I mentioned at first has the "P" symbol (paragraph break) at the end of the lines. But when I replaced them like you said, it did not allow me to justify the text at all.

2) The text I wrote and pasted into TextMaker just now DOES have line breaks as you suspected, and I am able to replace and justify. But what I end up with is this:

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

As you can see, it stretches the lines beyond belief. So my next question is: is there a way to automate it to where TextMaker will correct those spaces?

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

Your image still shows the line breaks at the end of the lines. So, obviously, you didn't replace (remove) them.

BTW: In File > Properties, tab "View", there is a Button "Compatibility". When you click it, you get a list of options. One of these is "Do not justify lines that end with a soft return (Shift+Return)". When you select it, the stretched lines will go back to their usual length, but of course the line breaks will still be there. To get a continuous text you must get rid of them.

Well, but try to copy & paste into TM r656... You select the text, go to find/replace, enter the line break symbol in the top box and either space or nothing in the bottom and click 'replace all', and those line break symbols do not go away...

But it does something, because I cannot justify the text before I do this line break replacing -- but I can do it after I perform the line break replace action.

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

When you do this replace action, what message do you get after clicking "Replace all"? How many words does it say have been replaced?

Hmmm... at first I could not justify the text at all, but now it stretches it when I do justify, even when I start with a new document.

EDIT: In fact, I am SURE I could not justify at all when I first copied and pasted the text from this forum (that I wrote earlier). But now in a new doc it does allow me to justify, albeit very stretched

But, in fact, it says "0 replaced".

EDIT2: I tried the soft return setting, but like you say that won't get rid of the non-continuous line problem.

What I am looking for is a way for the word processor to look for "." (period) in order to determine where a line ends.

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User

Alright, when it says "0 replaced", nothing was replaced.

So, before clicking "Replace all", do one of the following things:

Either: make sure the cursor is at the beginning of the text

or: in the dialog box, select "Search from top" in "Options".

Does this make any difference in the result?

Ah, yes!!! That did it. Thank you!

(So, does that mean TextMaker does not work with selected text in this way?) EDIT: When I mark "Search from top" it works as well.

The bigger pdf converted document, however, is more problematic in that it has paragraphs breaks at the end of each line, so my conclusion is that the pdf conversion software I used isn't really all that good (I think it was Nitro PDF)

In fact, the best software I have tried so far is definitely ABBYY PDF Transformer. It converted the same document (to. doc) in a much better fashion, and I was able to justify the paragraphs without doing any replacing. In fact, all it required was some line spacing and it was done.

_________________
SoftMaker Office Pro 2012 Rev. 679 User