Paragraphing from Text

I have some PDF books/stories that weren't formatted well, so that the paragraphs are stacked on top of each other instead of having a line between them. I want to print some of these, and make them as readable as possible.

If I copy from PDF and paste into Word, or convert from PDF to Word, is there a way to separate each paragraph by putting a line beneath it, separating it from the next? An example is below.

This is how it looks now:

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This is way I would like it:

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Hmm...

SNB, I found my problem with your code; I had it in a module in NORMAL. When I moved it to a module for my document, it worked. However, it worked the way Abousetta described, creating the impression of double-spacing, not paragraphing as intended.

Would there be a way to do it based on line-length? I'm no expert in Word, but isn't there a limit to the number of characters that can exist in a line (determined by font and margins). So, if a line is less than, say, 95% of the max characters, we can assume that's a paragraph end, and plug in a paragraph mark?

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's run into this problem. If Word can't do it, do you know of a non-Word based approach that might work?

Still desiring a solution.

That would probably straighten it up a lot, but it wouldn't catch the ones where the line begins with a capital letter.

Going with my earlier thought, could I copy the text into Excel, and somehow get each line into a cell of it's own, then do LEN to determine length, plug in a symbol (say, a tilde) in the cell to the right of the cells with the least characters, assuming those are paragraph endings, then paste back into Word and replace the tildes with a paragraph symbol?

I'm definitely in favor of an easier solution if it's out there.

I'm all in favor of using Word's VBA, but am completely lost here.

So, how would we test the first character in each paragraph? I'm not even familiar enough with Word's VBa to get started.

Hi
I use this code in Word to quickly reformat imported text where lines import as paragraphs. It:

• replaces paragraph marks with spaces where they precede a word that does not begin with a capital letter (note this removes breaks intended to precede lower case letters, eg dot points. You might want to sort those out separately)
• Removes paragraph breaks between commonly capitalised words and phrases
• removes para breaks after words unlikely to precede a para break (such as 'and')

you might want to save your file before you try it!

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Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to this.

ProtonLeah, I tried your code, and it did an excellent job. The only thing it didn't seem to catch was paragraphs that end in quotation marks.

Abousetta, wow! I tried your code, and again the only problem was with quotation marks. See the paragraph below for a sample.

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SNB and NickyC, I also tried your codes. They didn't seem to do anything noticeable, though Nicky's caused a lot of furious whirring before ending up with what looked to all intents and purposes like the original document I started with. I've attached the document I'm trying all of these macros on so you can tell me if I've done something wrong and can see the same results I'm seeing.

Thanks SNB; good idea on making the invisible visible.

Your latest rendition does a great job, but still having trouble with quotations. I don't think they'll ever be 100%, but I think we can get closer. See the text below:

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Notice that we have some back-to-back quotation marks? If we have two quotation marks together, chances are good that we should have a paragraph break between them. Also, quotation marks usually travel in pairs; where there's one, there should be a second, with no paragraph break between. So, the paragraph break following "mother" shouldn't be there. I'm not understanding how your macro works, so don't know how to tweak it for these situations. I'd appreciate some help in understanding.

I think we have a problem with this last bit of code. When I run it it seems to delete a large portion of the quotation marks. See the same sample text I pasted earlier as it appears after running this macro:

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No, but now we're back where we were. See the sample paragraph now:

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Well, in this section we have back-to-back quotations, which should be separated by a paragrph break.

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In this section we have a paragraph break in the middle of a section bounded by quotation marks (if there is one quotation mark, the next paragraph break shouldn't come until after the next quotation mark, except in rare circumstances).

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Same thing with this section

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Right. If a person is speaking, their text is surrounded by quotation marks. If they speak five sentences, there's a quotation mark preceding the first sentence, and following the last sentence. So, if there are 2 quotation marks together, it indicates the end of one person speaking, and the beginning of another person speaking. Usual convention is that the speaker's dialogues are separated into distinct paragraphs. See below for how this particular section should be paragraphed:

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