I have a program that I need to paste text from Word into that has a character per line limitation. What I need to paste in is in paragraph format, and the program seems to prefer lines. It limits characters per line to 65 but if you paste a paragraph in and let it do it’s word wrap, it will have too many characters on some lines which will be cut off when the file is saved.
The words and characters per line in Word is correct, I figured that part out. What I need to know how to do is copy that text and have it paste into the other program line for line, not as a paragraph. I’ve tried pasting into notepad, but that gives me the same issue. What I’ve been forced to do has been copy and paste each line separately, which works but is very inefficient.
The program I’m trying to paste into is an ancient RUMBA mainframe terminal emulated application called EDS, not that it will help.
Can this be done? It sure seems to me that something so simple could be.
Can you upload to the program rather than paste it? I’ve worked with similar length limitations but it always involved a step where we’d upload a text file. If you can do that, then it would be a matter of using Excel to divide the paragraphs into lines of appropriate size (what you have in Word is not really divided into lines - it only looks that way) and then saving it into an uploadable format (.txt, .csv).
If not, run a test using Excel to divide a sample paragraph into lines of appropriate size and then copy-paste a chunk of lines; that may work.
Does it have to be Word? Word is a word processing program, it doesn’t have this feature because it’s not built to-- it’s built to do page layout, where the last thing you want is to split-up paragraphs into lines.
You could try a programmer’s editor, such as Sublime Text 2, which has a “split selection into lines” feature. That’s going to be your best bet. (I assume you can customize the length of a “line” to be 64 characters, but I’ve personally never tried this.)
The trade-off is that a programmer’s editor isn’t going to be as easy to use as Word, so there might be some learning curve involved.
If nothing else you can create a macro in Word that advances one character right 65 times, tehn does a {word left} (Ctl-left arrow) then inserts an {enter} and repeats.
That should divide your Word document into lines of no more than 65 characters and start each line at the beginning of a word.
The old ones are the best, I think I am digging this up from over 20 years ago for some WP program or other.
Install a “generic text Printer”, this is a standard windows device.
May help to select a non-proportional font such as Courier for all text.
Print to a file.
Open that file in Notepad, and there you go…
I couldn’t get Excel to cooperate, and haven’t had much time to play with the other solutions yet. The text editor, macro and generic text printer all sound quite promising.