jofish22 ([info]jofish22) wrote,
@ 2008-03-31 12:48:00
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Stupid pasting!
Does anybody know how I can paste something from Acrobat into Word without it taking every new line as a hard CR? IE, I want to paste this from an Acrobat document

Moving from inspiration, or glimpses of particular lives as
possibilities in a design space, to information that seeks to
pinpoint exact requirements or needs of general
communities is symptomatic of different stances on the
ultimate goal of interpretation, in particular whether it
should be open or closed. The former approach sees
interpretation as opening up a variety of possibilities [52].
The latter sees interpretation as a process of negotiation
toward one single, correct, and unambiguous
understanding; the need to establish a single interpretation
then leads to a proliferation of methods to support a
narrowing of and verification of the potential design space.

but make it look like this:

Moving from inspiration, or glimpses of particular lives as possibilities in a design space, to information that seeks to pinpoint exact requirements or needs of general communities is symptomatic of different stances on the ultimate goal of interpretation, in particular whether it should be open or closed. The former approach sees interpretation as opening up a variety of possibilities [52]. The latter sees interpretation as a process of negotiation toward one single, correct, and unambiguous understanding; the need to establish a single interpretation then leads to a proliferation of methods to support a narrowing of and verification of the potential design space.

Should not be the rocket science, no? But I can't figure out how to make it do it in any way other than just deleting that CR/LF (or whatever it is) at the end of each line.

I'm not sure whether it's Acrobat sucking or Word sucking here. It does strike me that it should be possible to fix it in Word, though, and I can't figure out how. Right now if I want to do it I'm pasting it into TextPad, selecting it and Ctrl-J reformatting as a single line, then cut-and-pasting back out. Which works but is clearly ridiculous.



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[info]dr_tectonic
2008-03-31 07:27 pm UTC (link)
Try one of the "paste special" options? That's my best guess.

I suspect the problem is that there actually are hard returns in the source selection, so you're going to have to strip them out somehow. If you don't like the TextPad solution, you could always paste it into the Word doc, select it, and do a search-and-repace for hard returns...

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[info]bats22
2008-03-31 11:24 pm UTC (link)
I think the way I have solved this in the past is:

Edit -> Replace

Hit "More" button

Find What: Special -> Paragraph Mark

Replace With: Space (or nothing, depending on how it is formatted)

Alternately, I sometimes drop it into Eudora, and do Message Plug Ins-> Unwrap Text

Hope this helps.

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[info]bats22
2008-03-31 11:26 pm UTC (link)
Also, if you need to do this for multiple paragraphs:

Find What: Special -> Paragraph MarkParagraph Mark (will show up ^p^p)

Replace With: AAAA (or some other string that would not exist in the document).

Then:

Find What: Special -> Paragraph Mark

Replace With: Space (or nothing, depending on how it is formatted)

And then:

Find What: AAAA

Replace With: ^p^p

What sucks really hard is if you have an Acrobat document with columns, and copy-paste grabs multiple columns.

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[info]ocschwar
2008-04-01 12:02 am UTC (link)
Emacs for Windows sucks very little.

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[info]thatwesguy
2008-04-01 04:07 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, I routinely fire up emacs and do M-x replace-string for this kind of crap. It's incredible.

I have heard that TextWrangler for Mac is good for this sort of thing as well.

Bottom line: no one seems to use Just Plain Text anymore, and I think that that's a tactical error on the world's part.

Psyched to hear about these solutions. I'm probably going to try all of them at some point just because this is one of those annoying things that a really clean process for would save me a lot of workaround time in aggregate.

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[info]dr_tectonic
2008-04-01 10:11 pm UTC (link)
Emacs is just indispensible. There are tasks that become simply impossible without tools like M-x replace-regexp and string-rectangle...

(Reply to this) (Parent)

copy from Pdf
(Anonymous)
2008-06-07 07:05 pm UTC (link)
Dude, buy this software, or download a copy, and you can convert pdf into word, excel or any other Office based software. I use it all the time:

Then you can copy the text from word and use it as you please.

http://www.investintech.com/able2extract.html

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