I have just copied all text from a .pdf into MSWord 2000, because I want to edit it. I’m finding a lot of page breaks in the document that I would like to be able to get rid of.
Problem is that I can’t actually see the page breaks. I used to be able to toggle the “show formatting” button to show and hide things like tabs and page breaks, but now I can only see carriage returns and spaces.
The “Help” feature is not being very forthcoming about the issue so thought I’d pick the brains of helpful Dopers. How do I gain access to these codes in MSWord 2000?
Try this (I can’t verify, as I don’t have Word 2000 here at work). You use the Show/Hide button on the toolbar, but this should control what exactly that shows/hides:
Click on the Tools->Options menu item.
Select the View tab.
Select/deselect checkboxes under Formatting Marks for what you want to see/not see.
You can find manual page breaks by searching for ^m – that’s the caret above the 6, followed by lower case m. You can search for them one-by-one, and fix as appropriate, or use Replace to replace them with a normal line break, which is represented by ^p
I think this is the key, if you are in Print Layout view you won’t see the marks for page breaks. If you are in Normal view, you see them without having to choose an option.
I don’t know if this will help you, but whenever my Word docs get all weird on me with the formatting, I just reset the format by pasting everything into Notepad. That’s such a simple program that no font or formatting is saved. Copy and paste the text back from Notepad into Word and you probably have a more normal looking layout