Paste from Web Paragraph Spacing

[abaer]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

New MAC user here. I apologize for arriving so late.

When I copy, paste special, unformatted text from *most* news sites on the web to Word on MAC there is NO space between paragraphs.

But

When I copy, paste special, unformatted text from *most* news sites on the web to Word on PC there is a space between paragraphs.

I know of three potential fixes.

1) The first is to add spacing after the paragraphs using format/paragraph/spacing/before or after. This solution fails for two reasons. One, my document is large, involving multiple pastes, and parts require spacing without before or after spacing. Making that change in parts of the document and not in others would be burdensome. Second, when I copy and paste from MAC word to Entourage (or sending the file to my PC and copying to Outlook) the spacing before and after is deleted.

2) Manually enter a paragraph break after each each paragraph. Again, this solution is burdensome as we're talking about 40 to 50 pages of text.

3) Use find/replace to replace every paragraph mark with two paragraph marks. This solution is best, but as there are still portions of the document where I do not want paragraphs to be double spaced, there is still a great deal of clean up work to do.

So anyway, finally the question:

Is there anyway to change the paste special/unformatted text settings so that MAC Word will treat the pasted text the same way that PC Word does?

 

[Clive Huggan]

Dar [whoever],

A warm welcome to the Mac! (By the way, might as well tell you now for the
long road ahead: "MAC" is "Media Access Control"; "Mac" is short for the
Macintosh apple.)

I'm not aware of how PC Word treats the situation (someone else will,
though, so stick around). However, I strip out all double paragraph marks
from website text (^p^p is replaced by ^p in the "Replace" window). In Word
2004, I use a macro that does this and other things, but the Word 2008
downgrade does not have macros, of course.

I put them back in if I need to send it in Entourage (although in plain,
i.e. non-html, text in Entourage that isn't needed, at least in Entourage
2004).

There are many advantages to not having double paragraph marks in Word. If
you have time, take a look at page 167 and thereabouts in some notes on the
way I use Word for the Mac, titled "Bend Word to Your Will", which are
available as a free download from the Word MVPs' website
(http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html).

[Note: "Bend Word to your will" is designed to be used electronically and
most subjects are self-contained dictionary-style entries. If you decide to
read more widely than the item I've referred to, it's important to read the
front end of the document -- especially pages 3 and 5 -- so you can select
some Word settings that will allow you to use the document effectively.]

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the Americas and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
====================================================

 

[John McGhie]

The short answer is "No"

On the PC, most browsers will return a PC "paragraph mark" at the end of
each paragraph. That's two characters, which Word translates into a
paragraph mark; which takes the spacing of the style you apply to that
paragraph.

Most Mac browsers will return a "Unix line-ender" at the end of each
paragraph. That's a single character which Word translates into a "New
Line" character, which does not have a paragraph style and does not get any
spacing.

Then there are the web-sites that have hard line-ends at the end of each
line, which lead to pure misery.

It's often worth pasting into a text editor such as TextEdit first, to clean
off the junk, before pasting into Word. At least what you get by doing that
is consistently wrong

There is also a tool in Entourage named "Rewrap Paragraphs". This is highly
useful for cleaning up text such as this.

Hope this helps

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

New MAC user here. I apologize for arriving so late.

When I copy, paste special, unformatted text from *most* news sites on the web
to Word on MAC there is NO space between paragraphs.

But

When I copy, paste special, unformatted text from *most* news sites on the web
to Word on PC there is a space between paragraphs.

I know of three potential fixes.

1) The first is to add spacing after the paragraphs using
format/paragraph/spacing/before or after. This solution fails for two reasons.
One, my document is large, involving multiple pastes, and parts require
spacing without before or after spacing. Making that change in parts of the
document and not in others would be burdensome. Second, when I copy and paste
from MAC word to Entourage (or sending the file to my PC and copying to
Outlook) the spacing before and after is deleted.

2) Manually enter a paragraph break after each each paragraph. Again, this
solution is burdensome as we're talking about 40 to 50 pages of text.

3) Use find/replace to replace every paragraph mark with two paragraph marks.
This solution is best, but as there are still portions of the document where I
do not want paragraphs to be double spaced, there is still a great deal of
clean up work to do.

So anyway, finally the question:

Is there anyway to change the paste special/unformatted text settings so that
MAC Word will treat the pasted text the same way that PC Word does?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]