In the first sample document, there was a space preceding every paragraph mark in all of the examples, so I wrote the wildcard string to include that space. In addition, the numerals, which were unrelated to the content, let me know where paragraphs ended.

Without the numerals in the first doc, I can't know how to differentiate one paragraph from another, and the macro's purpose is to remove a very common indicator of the end of a paragraph: two consecutive paragraph marks.

Running a modified version of the macro would therefore remove every paragraph mark and add at least one extra space, but you'd end up with a document that consists of just one massive paragraph.

The same would be true for the second document, but there wouldn't be an extra space. (In the second sample document, there are no spaces before or after paragraph marks, which is why the macro isn't working in it.)

You could get around this problem by manually locating the end of every paragraph and typing a short text string as a temporary marker -- I like to use QQ -- run the macro (it needs to be modified first), then replace the markers with paragraph marks.

If the files have spaces at the end of every line because you are copying/pasting from PDFs, then, depending on your PDF app, you should be able to select text in the PDF, right click, and use a "Copy with formatting" feature, which would allow you to paste the text elsewhere without adding paragraph marks at the end of each line. Alternatively, you could open the original PDF into Word, and even though the formatting won't be right, and you wouldn't want to create a file this way, then work on it, you could at least copy text without paragraphs after each line.