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Old 08-06-2007, 07:09 PM   #8
LaughingVulcan
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Posts: 204
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Land of Lincoln
Device: PRS-650 Sony, Nook Simpletouch, more legacy gear than I can remember
To start with, though, you can:

* Open the document in Word
* Hit the Paragraph symbol button (Word's equivalent of Reveal Codes)
* See if there is an easy pattern
* If so, do search-and-replaces (using the "More" and "Special" tabs in the S&R window.)

If, for example, you have two hard returns in between every paragraph, and every line ends in one hard return, the following will work well:

* Replace for every instance of two hard returns (in Word this is called a "paragraph mark" - when using the "Special" button it will appear as "^p" - so the Search box looks like "^p^p".) Replace it with something made up like "=-*-=" is what I do.
* Now that all the paragraphs are "=-*-=", replace all remaining Paragraph marks with a space or a null. (Depends on the file format. Usually I'll replace the para mark with a space.)
* Now replace all instances of "=-*-=" with a paragraph mark plus a tab character.

* If the quotation marks and apostrophes in the text are all straight " and not curly quotes, I'll do an S&R simply replacing quote mark with quote mark (Search:",Replace:") and the same for apostrophes. Word will automatically change them to curly quotes and BD will recognize them.

It's worked for me before, but as above, you have to have some idea of what the format is by using reveal codes (or whatever Word calls that now.) Sometimes there is a Tab character you can lock onto as the search term to differentiate paragraphs. And yep, there are some files where you just have to go in and manually add "paragraphination" since there's no easy way to batch S&R it.
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