Hi,
There is one function Microsoft word has in their replace that I use to
clean up or convert documents, and that is the ability to find and replace
special characters, such as Paragraph marks, page breaks, and manual line
breaks.
The document I am currently looking at is a good example. The lines end
leaving a lot of space on some lines, extending the length of the document.
In Word I would replace all occurrences of 2 paragraph marks with a page
break, then replace all paragraph marks with spaces, then replace page
breaks with paragraph marks that have .5 line spacing after them. On an
average this can reduce the length of a document my 25%, significant when
printing out a document that is currently 400 pages.
If you want more details on how the GUI side works in Word, I can give them
to you. I can tell you that you have the option of selecting a Paragraph
mark, or typing ^p in the search or replace box, and there are different
letters for different special characters. However, even if I have to select
all the characters from a menu, it would be worth it.
I think you may want to have a look at the "regular expressions" aspect
of the Search/Replace feature in OOo. This is activated in that function
dialog by using the "More options" button and then checking the
appropriate box, and I'd advise reading the help on that topic to see
what can be done. For instance "^$" will search for empty paragraphs,
"[:space:]*$" for ending spaces in paragraphs, etc.
I am using OpenOffice more and more, as the functionality does everything
WORD does for what I do. Until I tried to shorten this document. I have
not done coding in decades, and am just now trying to get back into it.
What language is OpenOffice written in?
The core of the application is written in C++, but extensions to the
application can be written in a variety of languages, for instances Java
or Python.
Cyrille
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