The topic header says it all… When I try to copy and paste a paragraph from a PDF in the Research folder, I get the text, but there is a line break after every line as it appeared in the original PDF.
In Word, I can find and replace the line break character, which is clunky but works, but I can’t even see how to do that within Scrivener. And using the Documents | Convert function doesn’t make a difference.
Can someone please tell me how to overcome this issue?
Thanks!
To simplify the question, forget about converting from PDF. How do I find/replace line breaks/carriage returns with spaces in Scrivener for Windows? It seems like there’s a way to do that on the Mac version, but I can’t seem to figure it out on the Windows side.
Have you tried re-parsing the PDF text using Ghostscript?
That’s one way to go, but after fighting with Ghostscript for the last fifteen minutes with no luck, I’m thinking it’s not right for me.
My use case is more to just extract a few lines of text here and there and just replace the hard carriage return/line feeds with spaces. That can’t be so difficult to do with Scrivener, can it? It seems like it can be done on the Mac side, at least.
Until there is a clearer answer on the Windows side of Scrivener, there are several online utilities that can sub in as a workaround:
https://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php
http://removelinebreaks.net/
Of the two, the former is simpler, but the latter has more configurability to it. Not ideal, but at least it’s better than doing it with my keyboard.
I also find that text copied out of PDFs (not in Scrivener, but from Adobe’s own PDF reader) generally have linebreaks at the end of every displayed line. My workaround involves the clipboard manager I use, ClipCache. It allows you to remove linebreaks from an item copied to the clipboard, and then copy the fixed-up version and paste it. For a few lines at a time, it’s simple and fairly convenient.
Tou should also have a “Show Invisibles” mode that shows the paragraph, tab, and other non-visible characters in your text. Not sure where that menu is, but once invoked, it’s easy to find the extra paragraph characters to select or delete.
If you have Keyboard Maestro, you can build a macro that will copy the text, and delete the line breaks from the clipboard using regex in one step.