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Solving a Peculiar Printing Problem

By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

The Problem

Have you ever wondered why sometimes the sentences in an e-mail don't go all the way to the edge of the screen or
if you copy them into your word processor
there are annoying
breaks in the paragraph where you don't want them?

To understand what happens, take your mind back to those long-ago days before the digital age, when all we had were clunky dumb machines that required the user to hit the return bar to move down one line. If you wanted to create a space between paragraphs, you hit the bar twice. Simple. Then computers were discovered and clever software programmers decided to make it even easier and fixed it so you can create paragraphs without that bothersome return bar. That's why today you can set the margins in your word processor document and the sentences flow easily from line to line.

HOWEVER, the language of e-mails and most Internet text is a different matter. In these cases the width of lines are controlled by the size of the window in which an e-mail is written or by the width of text on a website page. Software automatically places what is called a "soft return" or "manual line break" at the end of each line. You can also do this yourself, as I did in the first paragraph, by holding the shift key and clicking Enter or Return.

The problem is that this often causes strange line breaks when you open an e-mail unless the window in which you're viewing the message is as wide as the window in which it was created. So often all you need to do is use your cursor to stretch the e-mail window so it becomes wider. This should fix the problem of reading broken-up paragraphs on the screen.

When you transfer the e-mail to a word document, however, or copy an Internet article to a word document, you will notice broken lines or the lines won't go all the way to the edge of the window. In a few cases, things look normal, but most of the time an adjustment is needed. But don't worry, it's easy if you know how to interpret the instructions in a document that tell it when to create a new line or paragraph, how far over to place a tab, etc.

The problem is that it's hard to read a document if you see every space, paragraph return, and tab mark. So the program hides them unless you tell it to show themselves. By the end of this article, however, you will have discovered a few secrets that any professional writer knows and be able to create neat looking paragraphs (well, with a little practice you will).

Begin by copying an Internet page or an e-mail and pasting the text into a new word document. Then click on the paragraph icon at the top of your word document screen. This will allow you to see all those invisible marks. The soft return, enemy of copied e-mails, is a bent arrow.

You can remove this soft return mark by just using the delete key and adding a space to separate the words that now appear on the same line (by clicking the space bar). On a short piece this is no problem. With an article or lengthy e-mail, it can take a very long time!

The Solution

A quicker solution in the long run - and something that is great fun because you can feel so smug in knowing how to do it - is to use your word processor program. With Microsoft Word, the program I am most familiar with, there are several very easy steps to go from a strange paragraph to one that looks more acceptable. If you have another word program, it may help you to read the following to get an idea of what should be possible and then check your instruction manual.

1. Make a copy of the document into which you've pasted the Internet page or e-mail, just in case you make a mistake and need to start over. It will probably take you a couple trials before you feel really comfortable in doing this, but then you'll never be bothered by sloppy paragraphs again.

2. Notice the soft returns (manual line breaks) and paragraph marks. Usually two bent arrows will create a space between paragraphs.

3. Select the whole document either with Control key plus A or choose Select All from the Edit menu. .

4. Open the Replace dialogue box under Edit.

5. Choose More to give you all possible options.

6. Put your cursor in the Find What field box.

7. Open the Special option. This will give you a menu of features such as tab character, section break, and paragraph mark.

8. Click on Manual Line Break. When you do this, ^l should appear in the Find What field. (You can also create it manually by using the Shift plus the 6 key and then typing the small letter l, but notice it's not the number 1, which looks a lot like it on the screen.)

9. Do it again so that you have ^l^l in the Find What box. There should not be a space between them.

10. Now move the cursor to the Replace field and choose Special option again. This time choose the paragraph mark, which is ^p. The reason you have to do this NOW is because later, when you replace all the soft returns, you won't know where the paragraph breaks occur.

11. Repeat step 10 so you have ^p^p in the Replace With box.

12. Click replace all.

13. Again put your cursor in the Find field box and this time only put ONE ^l in the field. (There aren't any double manual line breaks left.)

14. Move the cursor to the Replace With field and hit your space bar once. What you're doing now is telling the document to create a space between the words that previously appeared on separate lines but will now appear next to each other. If you only eliminate the soft return, you will create combination words, like "orif," "processorthere," and "annoyingbreaks," as would happen to the sample paragraph above. .

15. Click replace all.

You're done! Now your document should have no strange breaks.

© Copyright 1997, Revised 2002, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT