Word XP reformatting? (removing returns)

Factual Questions
1

I have downloaded a document from the internet, which is “helpfully” formatted to the following:

Is there any easy way (using Word XP) to reformat and remove some of the carriage returns for ease of printing. Yes, I could go through manually, but I’m looking at around 110 pages.

Thanks Dopers (and metatusers)

2

You can’t have Word to selectively remove some of the carriage returns. You can use the advanced replace function to remove all the carriage returns. It just doesn’t have any sophisticated regular expression handling ability to let you do that.

3

That’s fine; I do want to remove them all.

Thanks for your help.

4

Try Edit|Replace

Click “More” in the dialog.
In the “Special” dropdown, select “Manual Line Break” and ensure it puts a ^| in the “Find What” textbox. Leave “Replace With” blank. Click “Replace” a few times to make sure it’s doing what you want - if so, click “Replace All”.

5

I do this a lot. Here’s my procedure:

  1. Make sure that there you have two breaks between real paragraphs.
  2. Find a character that appears nowhere in the document. I usually use ~
  3. Replace all double paragraph marks (^p^p) with the character you chose.
  4. Replace all remaining single paragraph marks (^p) with a blank space.
  5. Replace all the ~ characters with a single or double paragraph mark.

Done!

6

Thanks Keeve for getting the answer spot on (You rock), and props to DarrenS and Urban Ranger for getting me half way there.

7

Nice trick Keeve

8

I gotta get me one of those new fangled computer with carriage returns.