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 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?
