Replacing end of paragraph space symbol with paragraph after spacing.

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The title of this post is probably confusing, but I wasn’t sure how to describe what I meant in ten words or less. When a writer prepares a manuscript for publication, spaces between paragraphs denoting a shift in location or time have a symbol in them, usually #. That doesn’t show when the book is published, but if the writer does that with a self-published ebook, it does.

Which means that if I’m converting a manuscript intended for print, I have all these symbols to manually replace with paragraph after spacing. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use find/replace to replace all the # with 12 points of after spacing. I should mention that blank lines created by the enter key aren’t recognized by the online conversion process.

Any exotic wild card solutions available?

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Try:

Find what: ^p#^p

Replace with: ^p With the cursor in the replace box click the Format button > paragraph and adjust the space after value to what you want.

Then click replace all.

If something goes wrong, undo and adjust your settings.

Pam

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Try:

Find what: ^p#^p

Replace with: ^p With the cursor in the replace box click the Format button > paragraph and adjust the space after value to what you want.

Then click replace all.

If something goes wrong, undo and adjust your settings.

Pam

Thanks for the response, Pam, but while it said it replaced 77 items–which shows its heart was in the right place–the fix seems a little haphazard. One time it fixed two places and left the others untouched, and another time it removed the # but closed the spacing up. It’s almost as if one process (Format/Paragraph/after spacing fights the Find/Replace box. Any other ideas?

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Search is very specific and can only do what we tell it. If there are any other characters in the string, search won’t find it. Click the show/hide button to turn on nonprinting formatting marks. You may see little dots (spaces), little circles (the symbol for the no break space), or arrows (tabs) there. The ^p in the search is a paragraph mark (¶) in the text. But if line breaks were used (↵ in the text), they wouldn’t be found either. After you determine what’s really there, we can devise a new search string.

Pam

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Search is very specific and can only do what we tell it. If there are any other characters in the string, search won’t find it. Click the show/hide button to turn on nonprinting formatting marks. You may see little dots (spaces), little circles (the symbol for the no break space), or arrows (tabs) there. The ^p in the search is a paragraph mark (¶) in the text. But if line breaks were used (↵ in the text), they wouldn’t be found either. After you determine what’s really there, we can devise a new search string.

Pam

All the cleanup had already been done (tabs, line breaks, extra spaced before paragraph marks, etc). The manuscript is clean, except for the #. I normally go through and remove the # space holder symbol manually, but it would be a big help if I could automate it. Since the search found all the # symbols, I assume that part works well.

I just performed the same thing manually, finding a #, then deleting it, then deleting the space it occupied. There was, of course, another space created by the Format/Paragraph/after space function. Deleting the space deletes the Format/Paragraph/after space as well, which is apparently what happened when the spaces closed up. In other words, when it deletes the # mark, it apparently deletes the after spacing I entered. Does that make sense?

James

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No, I’m having trouble understanding. When I said space, I meant like the space, for example, between words. When you say space, I’m not sure whether you are talking about the pound sign (#), a line space (or extra paragraph mark (¶)) between paragraphs, or both.

When you are cleaning up, please turn on the formatting marks. It’s too easy to delete too much. Deleting a # won’t get rid of the space after, but deleting the following ¶, where the coding for the space after resides, will.

If the document is as clean as you say, the find and replace should have caught all of them. Can you post a (maybe scrambled) sample of what you started with?

HTH,
Pam

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No, I’m having trouble understanding. When I said space, I meant like the space, for example, between words. When you say space, I’m not sure whether you are talking about the pound sign (#), a line space (or extra paragraph mark (¶)) between paragraphs, or both.

When you are cleaning up, please turn on the formatting marks. It’s too easy to delete too much. Deleting a # won’t get rid of the space after, but deleting the following ¶, where the coding for the space after resides, will.

If the document is as clean as you say, the find and replace should have caught all of them. Can you post a (maybe scrambled) sample of what you started with?

HTH,
Pam

I see the reason for the confusion. What I really have is a blank line between paragraphs, only it has the pound sign symbol in it. The idea is to delete the pound sign, then replace the space it was in (created by the ENTER key) with an equal space (12 points in this case) created by using after spacing in Format/Paragraph. What I would wind up with would be the blank line that you see in books. Only in ebooks it can’t be an enter key created blank line. I hope the attachment came out okay.

James

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The attachment came through fine. Yep, it looks prefect. Because the file was not created in Word, or at least, it was once worked on in another program, it’s possible that some of the returns are not Word returns. Please try this: Replace ^013 with ^p. Then run the ^p#^p to ^p + space after again. If this doesn’t work, I’m running out of suggestions. And nobody else is chiming in! Come on collective thinkers.

Pam

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The attachment came through fine. Yep, it looks prefect. Because the file was not created in Word, or at least, it was once worked on in another program, it’s possible that some of the returns are not Word returns. Please try this: Replace ^013 with ^p. Then run the ^p#^p to ^p + space after again. If this doesn’t work, I’m running out of suggestions. And nobody else is chiming in! Come on collective thinkers.

Pam

I don’t know what the first step did, but it did it 3366 times. The second step just closed up the spaces again. I may have to resign myself to doing it manually. 77 changes isn’t a lot, I guess. Thanks for the effort.

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Hi Thomasja,

You should be able to do it with a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ^13{1,}[#]^13{1,}
Replace = ^p
In your initial post, you say the characters are ‘usually #’. If there are other characters, you can add them to the # between the square brackets in the Find expression (eg [#&]. Note that some characters (eg !, *, ) need to be prefixed with a backslash (ie [#&!*]).

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Hi Thomasja,

You should be able to do it with a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ^13{1,}[#]^13{1,}
Replace = ^p
In your initial post, you say the characters are ‘usually #’. If there are other characters, you can add them to the # between the square brackets in the Find expression (eg [#&]. Note that some characters (eg !, *, ) need to be prefixed with a backslash (ie [#&!*]).

Thanks for the fix, Paul. When I said “usually,” I meant that # is standard in the print publishing industry, but some ebook authors use things like ~*~ and just leave them in the book. Mine are all older stories, otherwise they would have used after spacing from the get go.

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Hi Thomasja,

If you make the wildcard Find/Replace:
Find = ^13{1,}[#]{1,}^13{1,}
Replace = ^p
With a single instance of each of whatever characters the authors use for the separators (eg Find = ^13{1,}[#~*]{1,}^13{1,}) that should enable you to process the lot in a single pass.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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