formatting issue

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 6:44 am

Hey, I'm looking to compile info off several different pdfs into a single text file and I'm wondering if there is a quick way to de-columnize the text I cut and paste. I'm going to be mixing different original font sizes and column sizes so I want to be able to wipe out most of the original formatting so it fits the normal straight line margin to margin.

I've got MS office and Sun open office.

thanks in advance for the help (unless no one helps in which case pox on you all!!!!)

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Mon Dec 01, 2008 1:35 am

Past -> special -> without formatting

-Crissa

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Dec 03, 2008 10:50 pm

save as plaintext, or just paste into notepad (or other plaintext editor)

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 4:39 am

Thanks for the tips, but neither of them will eliminate the present breaks of the columns. I'm trying to avoid having to remove them manually from a hundred pages of combined texts from three books.

I'm trying to compile all the character generation info for Gurps 4ed into a single text rather than shuffling through 5 books to find a slight variation of on the same ability or skill.

I have managed to finagle the fonts and column size on the page to look about right though.

As aa second query. If I were to print a PDF but wanted to get rid of the margin art, is there an easy way to do that? the gurps margin art is just a solid dark colored band which is both ugly and ink wasting

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 4:57 am

You might ask on the forums at steve jackson if they have a Lite 4e compiled version PDF yet.

If you're getting hard line breaks, there is no real way to undo it, except for a really advanced bot, for which they don't just hand out on the street, ya know?

-Crissa

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 5:06 am

Here's a help page for Open Office

Removing Line Breaks
Use the AutoFormat feature to remove line breaks that occur within sentences. Unwanted line breaks can occur when you copy text from another source and paste it into a text document.

This AutoFormat feature only works on text that is formatted with the "Default" paragraph style.

1.Choose Tools - AutoCorrect.
2.On the Options tab, ensure that Combine single line paragraphs if length greater than 50% is selected. To change the minimum percentage for the line length, double-click the option in the list, and then enter a new percentage.
3.Click OK.
4.Select the text containing the line breaks that you want to remove.
5.In the Apply Style box on the Formatting bar, choose Default.
6.Choose Format - AutoFormat - Apply.

Oddly you can use the search and replace with the \n regular expression to replace characters with hard line breaks, but it doesn't seem to work to search for hard line breaks to replace them with other characters.

And as further options, you might consider:

Linux FMT command (if you have easy access to the right distro), or learning enough PERL to write a script to remove hard line breaks that occur before you've counted a block of text N characters long.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:35 am

JK: Yeah that did it thanks. Linux would have just made my brain hurt. I'm not the most IT savvy there is

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:47 am

In some search strings you can just paste a line with return in it. That's usually what I try.

-Crissa