Kinda hard to explain. I have my settings fixed so that paragraph marks (Carriage Returns) show. I can’t get one to show here, so let’s use P for the Paragraph mark.
e.g. text text text boring textP
more text more text.P
P
Okay.
But sometimes, when I highlight a section of text, I’ll find ghostly blocks of emptiness after one of those Paragraph marks. Let me us xxxxx to indicate a highlighted empty area.
text text text boring textPxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
more text more text.P
P
The xxx doesn’t show under ordinary circumstances, but it is visible when the whole block is highlighted. It’s one “block” of text, i.e., I can’t move the cursor into the middle of it. It usually goes all the way to the right margin. I can delete it as if it were a single character.
How do I “search and replace” these suckers?
The only way I can figure is to highlight the whole text and scroll down, visually scanning for highlighted empty space.
Or to put the whole damn file into Notepad and then back again, killing all Word formatting!
Thank you for putting up with my lame efforts at explaining this weird phenom!
If that xxxxxxxx is wider than a normal space would be, yet seems to be a single indivisible block of <something>, perhaps it is a tab character.
Take another look at the display options. In addition to making the paragraph mark visible (here ya go: ¶ ), there is another option (or two? I forget) to make each blank space and each tab character visible. Blank·spaces·are·displayed·as·a·small·centered·dot and you can easily see if··there···are····two·····or······more in a row. Tab characters are shown as some variety of right-pointing arrow.
(Still, not sure why you would ever see anything to the right of the ¶ mark on the same screen line.)
Search and replace for a space-paragraph break combination, replace with just a paragraph break. Repeat until all gone. In Word Find and Replace, the paragraph break is represented by “^p”.
It doesn’t seem to be a tab character, and it doesn’t seem to be a space. What’s really screwy is that it comes after a paragraph mark – and any time I try to insert anything deliberately after a paragraph mark, it gets placed at the beginning of the next line down.
It’s almost paradoxical. Nothing goes after a carriage return!
I can’t seem to make this happen, and I can’t figure any way to search for it.
I tried highlighting it and Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the “find” field in the find-and-replace function, but the find-and-replace was “grayed out” indicating that it thought the “find” field was empty. Whatever this ghost tab is, Word doesn’t recognize it as a character. I’ve tried pasting it into text, and can’t.
Could it be an artifact of the paragraph mark itself? I know Word likes to associate properties with paragraph marks. Justification, for instance; if you hit Enter inside a block of Centered text, the paragraph mark is centered. The paragraph mark appears to be where underlines and italics are indicated in some way…
Senegoid: You got it! With the “reveal codes” option, I can see the sucka. It’s a “Section Break (Next Page).” This is something I never have actually used, so they must have slipped in through some other kind of formatting. Maybe a scanning artifact, as some of my text came through a scanner.
I can replace ^b with nothing, and my problem is all solved!
(I often use manual page breaks – Ctrl-CR – and they are stored differently, as ^m. So I don’t risk losing anything I do want!)
Thank you very much for advice! I’m all happy now!
I think that isn’t right. Shift-Enter produces a manual line break, which can be searched for as ^l.
Ctrl-Enter produces a manual page break, ^m. I use these a lot, deliberately.
I just searched, and can’t find a keyboard shortcut for a manual section break. The more I think about this, the more likely it seems to me that I was getting them as scanning artifacts. I’m using Epson Scan to tiff files, and then Aabby Finereader OCR to convert directly to Word documents. I think what’s happening is the OCR is shoving in those “end of page” marks.
What’s really screwy is that Word is not always using them as such. The “section break next page” marker is embedded in the text…but often does not push the display down to the next page! (It does this properly for manual page breaks.)
Sometimes it does…but not always! When I converted the .docx to .mobi, I was getting unexpected page breaks. Extremely irritating!
Word is weird!
(I miss Word Perfect! I wish they’d won the word processing wars!)
Word inserts a lot of junk commands into documents. If I want to get rid of all that crap, I copy it and paste it into Notepad.
If you copy the text out of Notepad to something else, you should have a clean text-only document.
If you copy it back into a Word document, it might or might not work, depending on what the default settings are for that particular copy of the program.
I use very few enhancements… Underlining, centering, and page breaks. That’s about it. I’ve got some nice macros that change underlined text to UUUdelimiteduuu text, and back. Centering is rare enough I can just put it in manually.
So, yeah, I’ve done the Word to Notepad and back trick. But I’ve never used Wordpad. I just did an experiment, and, alas, saving to Wordpad and back preserves some crap I would rather lose. It kept section breaks. It also kept underlining and italics and centering and nice stuff, but it preserved too much crrrrrap.
I’ll keep using the Notepad clean-up strategy.
Thank you all again for advice and insights! Word really is a pretty good program. Nothing that big could exist without a few bugs!
I don’t understand this. I’m using Word 2010 and when I press the ¶ button in the Home menu, I see the paragraph marks, tabs, spaces, section breaks, page breaks, etc. The only thing I may not see are the squiggly underscores on misspelled words, as those are enabled or disabled separately. What are you pressing that shows only the paragraph marks?
Look under File >> Options >> Display to see the checkboxes for the various choices.
You may not know it, but all the buttons you see across the top in the Ribbon are customizable. So the OP may have removed the [¶] button that toggles all those symbols together and replaced it with a similar-looking button which just toggles the end-of-paragraph marks.
Heh! I customized damn near everything. My settings are to reveal the paragraph marks…but not most other formatting. I’ve turned off autocorrect, autocomplete, the option that turns 1/2 into the “1/2” character, etc etc.
Oddly enough, my installation of Word still tries to autocomplete the names of the months. If I start writing “Dec…” it will suggest “December.” I’d like to turn this off, but haven’t found out how. (Quite low on the overall scale of annoyances!)
(I did just figure out how to add “Autocorrect Options” to a Custom Group in the View Tab. But Autocorrect Options doesn’t seem to have a check box for “Month Names.” Mysterious. Also ooky.)