Copy and paste formatting.

[manxduke]

I frequently use my scanner and ocr software to copy old documents, and equally I copy and paste from the web. Depending on the original layout, I usually then spend time with a series of " END, Rt arrow, backspace, spacebar" key presses, and alternatively, "down arrow,right arrow, backspace, spacebar" as appropriate.
Is there a simple way of formatting the text without the above rigmarole? Not a problem with just one side, but when a lengthy document, a real pain, especially for a one-finger operator who then needs to check everything.
I suspect somebody will suggest some "macros" , but whilst I have heard of them, I have never used them and would need to be "lead by the nose" for success.
Any advice please?

[swingkyd]

IF you are not concerned about retaining formatting, I'd recommend a good text editor like: Notepad++
You can select the whole area with the mouse and press <Ctrl>+<J> and then cut and past into Writer for formatting.
It would be simpler. If you use Linux, than most editors will do. YMMV

[John_Ha]

If you switch on the non-printing characters (View > Non printing characters) you will see that the culprit is a soft carriage return - it looks like an arrow which starts downwards, then turns backwards. You can add soft return to a document by typing Shift/Return instead of Return.

A soft return looks a bit like <-| without the descender. If you want plenty, copy some text out of an email.

The good news is that is is very easy to convert them all to spaces and you don't need to write a macro.

1 Edit > Find and Replace > More Options > tick Regular Expressions
2 in Find type \n
3 in Replace type a single space character
4 Replace all

and all soft carriage returns are replaced by spaces.

Notes:
1 Make sure you untick the Regular Expressions box and do a dummy search so that next time you search you will be looking for normal text!

A Regular Expression is a special expression where, in the Find field, \n means soft return. Switching on Regular expressions means OOo searches for the soft return and not for the two characters " \n ".

2 \n in Find is a Regular Expression for a soft return.

3 \n in Replace is the Regular Expression for a normal return (so if you put \n in Replace all soft returns will be converted to normal returns

3 Read the HELP in Find and Replace - it will show you all the Regular Expressions.

If you want a macro, the one below does it. Note it is in two parts - the first part makes the changes; the second part unticks the Regular Expressions tick box and does a dummy search for a space character to make sure the box is changed.

How can I copy this macro in to my OOo?

It is simplest to record your own macro.

To use this code, do it the simple way. Record a simple dummy macro - see Help - and save it as Fred.

Tools > macros > organise macros > and navigate to Fred

Highlight Fred > Edit

and just paste all the text below the end of Fred (Or replace Fred by it).

[manxduke]

Thank you both for the above. Last night I downloaded notepad ++, and I will try that method this evening. After that, I will try the next suggestion. I will keep my fear of macros intact, unless neither of the other two methods works for me.
Regards, manxduke.

[swingkyd]

View-> line endings in Notepad++ to determine if it's a soft carriage return (ie only CR and not CR LF). If so, you can use notepad++ to fix that too probably faster than dispatch calls.
Perhaps we can rewrite the dispatch code to more basic API Search/replace descriptors.