Help Wanted re Line breaks in OpenOffice

[tamaranth]

I am using OpenOffice, and have a large quantity of text that has been pasted from Mozilla Firefox.

The formatting and special characters (reason for using OO not plain text) are fab: however, the line breaks are peculiar. They are not standard paragraph breaks, the sort you get when you hit Enter: those show up with the standard paragraph symbol, ¶. They behave the way that standard line breaks behave in Microsoft Word -- e.g. on a justified para, they yearn for the right margin, often with ridiculous spacing on the last line of a paragraph.

I'd like to replace all these line breaks with standard para breaks but I can't make OpenOffice display them, even by requesting display of non-printing characters, and I can't do a search that finds them, even via copy and paste.

Do I have to take the document home and do it in Word? Or is there a better way?

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

try replacing ^l (that's lower-case L) with ^p and ^013 with ^p - it should turn them all into normal paragraph markers. http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/FindingSpecialCharacters.htm has the details for Word and it should be simialr for OO. check also tabs and column settings?

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

thanks for this -- but neither of those can be found!

I did take the document home and open it in Word: the line-returns showed as ↵, more or less, and could easily be pasted into the 'Find' box. (There were some weirdnesses with formatting of headers, too, that weren't visible in OO.)

Conclusion: OO all very well once you have the document you want, but getting the document to a sensible format is best done elsewhere!

What did you have in mind re tabs / columns?

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

that sounds like what Word treats as ^l - line marker rather than para marker - but what OO treats them as is anyone's guess. I'm not an OO fan myself ;-)

tabs/columns could have produced the right-leaning tendedncyn - a sray tab can shove the line across massively and a single column forces a shorter line length.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Definitely line marker not para, but OO (and Linux in general) seem to have a whole new set of rules.

The 'right-leaning tendency' is the same one you see in Word when you have a justified para that ends in a linefeed rather than a para mark -- the one that can always be fixed by hitting Enter at the end of the last line.

OO is the only WP app here at werk, and the only one installed on my (CD-drive-less) laptop, so I'll be using it in absence of anything else, rather than by choice! Notetab is fab for actual writing, but I need to comment and collaborate, and WP apps have better facilities (and it needs to be something that co-author has access too, as well).