[wordmuse]

Hi -

I'd like to set a margin at, say 58 characters write my text normally and then tell Word to hard break all lines at the margins. Does anyone know of any way to do that.

And then I'd like to be able to go the other way, too. Remove hard breaks so that the text is basically one line of long text.

Hopefully my meaning is clear?

Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Bal

[spot]

To take the second case first, you need to be able to distinguish a mid-paragraph hard break from and end-of-paragraph hard break. Both have the same code. If your end-of-paragraph is signified by two consecutive hard breaks then it's easy, you replace all ^p^p with qqq (say), then every ^p with a space, then every qqq back to ^p (or ^p^p, depending on how you intend laying out your text - I'd aim for ^p myself).

I assume there's a soft break you can search for and convert to a hard break but I don't have Word on this machine. Would it help if I look later?

Do you know how to write it as a macro?

If you've no formatting to preserve, there's a "save as ascii text with line breaks" that does your first job. You can save, reload and you've got what you wanted.

[wordmuse]

I was kind of hoping to not have to use a macro, and that Word just had a simple "break lines" command.

If I don't care about formatting, I'll just use Notetab Pro which has a "break lines" command.

Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Bal

[spot]

It does, I gave it to you - "save as ascii text with line breaks". It's a single action on your part which does exactly that, provides a simple "break lines" command.

As for doing it the other way I don't know an alternative in any editor, it's a simple three-way move regardless. A to TEMP, B to A, TEMP to B, to provide some means of not damaging the genuine end of paragraph condition.

The thing about the macro is that you have to actually do the job once whether you record it as a macro or not. If you record it, all the other times you want it done in any Word document it's reduced to a single key-stroke.

[wordmuse]

Hi Spot,

I guess I didn't communicate sufficiently well. What I'd really like is to be able write - with formatting - my text without worrying about breaking the lines. That's just using word wrap.

Then I'd like to break the lines and preserve the formatting. Saving to ascii doesn't get me there. And I don't know how to write a macro that lets me do it. I can record a macro that moves the cursor along 1 character to the right 58 times and then provides a ^p, but on a story of 5000 words, that gets very tedious.

I'm getting by by first writing the story in a plain text editor (in my case, Notetab Pro), breaking the lines there (because it's very easy) and then copying and pasting into Word and doing the formatting.

The difficulty is that if I want to do any kind of significant rewrite, I essentially have to start over again. Not fun.

I'm open to an alternative to my procedure if you can come up with one. :)

Thanks for helping me work through this.

Regards,
Bal

[Mike0001]

Sometimes it is better to take a step back. Could I ask why you want to do this?

[wordmuse]

Sure -

Because I have a variety of presentation needs.

Using Word, I can create formatted text and then paste it into a forum post like this with all formatting intact and use the same text in other settings where word wrap would be more appropriate.

I can also set the lines to break in email to various clients and if all they receive is plain text, then the breaks keep them from reading jagged text while those who can read HTML emails will see all the formatting in all its glory.

The point is that such a capability seems like a no-brainer to me. But apparently not.

Regards,
Bal