New trick I just learned. Maybe this is a no-brainer, but I’m pretty proud of myself.

Anyway, I needed to turn a PDF of “El túnel” by Ernesto Sabato into a Word document so I could easily load it onto my Kindle.

But when I did a simple copy and paste, this came up.

Image

Far too many new paragraphs in the middle of paragraphs. Holy Indents, Batman!

So rather than go through and delete each paragraph symbol individually, I wondered if I could get Word to do the work.

And it did. Here’s how you can, too.

Use the Find and Replace command (Ctrl+F) and insert a space and a paragraph symbol (use the “Special” option to find the right paragraph symbol) in the first field. Including the space makes sure you’re not deleting new paragraphs that are legitimate.

Tell Word to replace those two characters with just a space.

Fixing extra paragraph breaks 2

Voila.

Fixing extra paragraph breaks 3

At first, each fix was going to cost me three clicks. That means, total, I saved myself 7056 clicks.

It won’t fix everything about PDF’s funky text formatting (I’m going through right now and fixing page breaks, chapter/page number confusion, etc.) But it certainly saved me a lot of time.

Let’s file this in the “I love technology” archive.