Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!bill
From: bill@ut-emx.UUCP (Bill Jefferys)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: How to convert text (was Re: Improve MSWORD
Message-ID: <22711@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 22 Dec 89 18:47:28 GMT
References: <361@hgwells.GTE.COM> <37461@apple.Apple.COM> <1330@smurf.ira.uka.de>
Reply-To: bill@emx.UUCP (Bill Jefferys)
Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
Lines: 27

In article <1330@smurf.ira.uka.de> urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de (Matthias Urlichs) writes:
#In comp.sys.mac chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
#< dgp0@bunny.gte.com (Dennis Pratt) writes:
#< 
#< >Mr. James Scott writes that the solution of removing paragraph marks at 
#< >the end of a line is to to use the "change" command to replace ^p 
#< >(paragraph mark) with a space.
#< 
#< That's funny. I do it all the time. It doesn't take me hours. Maybe you
#< aren't using the right tools? Or working efficiently?
#< 
#Chuq, you are using Word 4.  Dennis is using Word 3.
#Replacing N instances of X with Y, with N >>100, is impossible in Word 3
#without plenty of time, frequent saves, and (depending on how much memory you
#have) a bomb shelter.

I used to do this on Word 3 with long documents, but there's
a trick. Suppose ^p^p is the end of a paragraph, and ^p the
end of a line. Then I would first replace ^p with ^p\. 
Then, ^p\^p\ --> ^p; Finally ^p\ --> <space>. This gets
around the problem with Word 3 that when you get rid of
all the paragraph marks to get one long paragraph (as Chuck
suggested) it takes FOREVER.

But I wish that Word had special tools for this.

Bill Jefferys