Removing Consecutive New Line characters

[Robert Gibson PWES]

Good night from Barbados!

I have a huge manuscript to lay out using Publisher, but I am sure that the reason the document is 800+ pages is because the author copy and pasted the original document into Word and sent it to me. I've used Place to put it into a Publisher file, but now I want to get rid of the extra spaces between paragraphs. In fact, because of how my paragraphs are set up (with a couple of pts space after each) I don't need the ENTER characters at all.

Is there a way to find and remove all the end of paragraph characters? I saw one possible solution in using regular expressions in my search through the forum, but still thought it prudent to ask, as reg. expressions aren't my forte.

Just an example screenshot.

[thomaso]

Your screenshot does not tell what is causing the spaces between paragraphs. Activate in menu Text > Show Special Characters. If they don't occur make sure that Preview Mode is disabled.

If the spaces are caused by multiple paragraph breaks then set in the Find & Replace Panel for "Find" 2 paragraph breaks and for "Replace" 1 paragraph break. Press "Find" to get them searched, then press "Replace All" to get the first duplicate in all instances replaced. Repeat "Replace All" until no results are in the list. In the sample below there are 3 instances of 3 brakes, so pressing "Replace All" twice will reduce them to 1.

[Robert Gibson PWES]

Thanks .... yes there are multiple paragraph breaks.... working on your solution now!

[Robert Gibson PWES]

Okay! Thanks! It looks like it worked!