It’s been driving me crazy for years, and this morning I’d had enough. There’s simply has to be another way!
I’m talking about when I’m given the job of rewriting or updating something from a PDF and when I copy & paste it into word, my first task is to take all the time I’d originally allotted for the whole job, to get the text ready to do the job. I’m talking about those pesky invisible line breaks and paragraphs that make formatting such a pain in the butt.
How to instantly remove unwanted line breaks when copying from a PDF
If you just grab the text and paste it straight in, you will often get these sorts of effects, where the lines don’t reach the right-hand edge of the page:
In order to make the process relevant and
accessible to industry, stage two has seen the
group working on two case studies with a
Or:
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Institute
of Materials, Minerals and Mining, its Council or its officers except where explicitly identified as such. This publication
is copyright under the Berne Convention and the international Copyright Convention
Richard Cooper is Web & New Media Development Manager for IOM3 and he posted this handy and easy way to trick Word into that making the job simple.
Basically all it does is automatically replace all the unwanted line breaks with a single space, making all the text run together into a single paragraph:
In order to make the process relevant and
accessible to industry, stage two has seen the
group working on two case studies with a
Or:
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Institute
of Materials, Minerals and Mining, its Council or its officers except where explicitly identified as such. This publication
is copyright under the Berne Convention and the international Copyright Convention
Richard Cooper is Web & New Media Development Manager for IOM3 and he posted this handy and easy way to trick Word into that making the job simple.
Basically all it does is automatically replace all the unwanted line breaks with a single space, making all the text run together into a single paragraph:
- copy the text you want from the PDF
- paste into a new Word document
- click “find” then “replace”
- make sure you’re in the “find what” field
- click “more” then “special”
- select “paragraph mark” (top of the list)
- click into the “replace with” field
- press the space bar once
- click “replace all”
- click “ok” then close the “find & replace” box.
That’s it. Instantly you’ll be left with all the text and nothing but the text that you can instantly start manipulating as you see fit. Hope this helps you out as much as it will for me.
I just can’t believe I’ve waited so many years to look it up
