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Removing Carriage Returns — Solved!

Website visitor, and now, new subscriber Phan Thu wrote:

13 Sep 08

Hi Terry:

This isn't a question but a brief but heartfelt note to THANK you. I had had trouble with LINE BREAKS in both MS Word and OO.o Writer. Google pointed me to your wonderful web site and since yesterday, thanks to your clear and detailed instructions, I've been able — on first try — to print text files copied from OE or T-Bird with lines spread across the full A4 page instead of only half or less of the page.
I'm talking about OO.o here. The workaround you indicated for MS Word seems more complicated but I'm planning to tackle it too.
Once more, THANK YOU, Terry.


Thu
ps I'll have plenty of other (easy?) questions to ask you.

Like a lot of other visitors, Thu found my article HOWTO: Removing Carriage Returns (Line Breaks, Form Feeds) from Documents. I'm glad to hear that he found it helpful — I'm always happy to hear from site visitors and newsletter subscribers.

The problem we all have with carriage returns, or carriage returns and line feeds, is that we like to copy content from emails and paste it into a different document so we can keep it.

However, most email programs break every line after 72 printable characters. Of course, they're smart enough that they break between words, so the 72 is usually something less, depending on the word that would have ended the line. That's the problem.

By removing the carriage returns, our word processors (or our email programs, if we want to send the information to someone else) can handle a paragraph as they normally would.

Copyright © 2008 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.