I am going quietly mad trying to find a way in Word to change automatically the paragraph format throughout a long document, specifically from block paragraphs (no indent, blank line between paragraphs) to indented paragraphs (no blank line, indent three spaces).



Now, in WordPerfect it was easy to design the macro:

Replace <full stop><Return><Return> with <full stop><Return><space><space><space>

Trying to do this in Word did not work. The search string would not accept Enter as a valid search term: the keystroke was interpreted as my ending the definition.

So I used the pilcrow symbol from the Character Map instead of the keystroke. This was accepted into the search string, but when the Replace was run it did not recognise line breaks (Returns = pilcrows) and did nothing.

There must be a simple way to do this, using either Replace or a macro. Advice?

Note that this document will undergo e-book conversion, which will strip away all formatting, so it is not acceptable to play games with the margin/first-line-indent features. The indent must be created as three spaces.

It would be much easier (childs play really) if you used Styles, the way Word is designed to be used.
The latter is NOT an indented paragraph. Again, if these are styles, it would take a very simple exercise to change things.

Agree with fumei. Here is a link that may help you get started:

http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/tipsonstyles.html

Of course, there are many other links others may provide...

Surely Styles creates formats?

The point I am making is that e-book conversion rips away all formatting, leaving you with just the most basic text. This is why indents have to be registered as three spaces. A Style won't pass through the conversion process (why would it? An e-book doesn't have the concept of a Style). Even successive Returns can cause problems on conversion.

I do need advice specifically on creating a macro (or getting the Replace function to recognise the pilcrow). I would especially welcome advice from someone who has published an e-book and so understands this particular challenge.

I have had a quick look at Styles, and what I say is true. I can only find two Styles (Manuscript and Traditional) that create indents, and BOTH of them do so merely by moving the first line indent marker (which, of course, I could do manually if that were any sort of solution). Neither removes the blank line.

In the link you gave me, it specifically states "A Style is a collection of formatting instructions". Indeed. Which is why your solution won't survive conversion.

Fumie: your claim that what I have described is not an indented paragraph suggests you are thinking purely in terms of Word. I am talking about typography, not computing. Since Caxton's time, indents have been made by three or more spaces (three or more 'ens'). Since all formatting is about to be destroyed, we have to go back to basics like this.

For, after conversion, I am going to end up with just an ASCII string and some carriage returns ... which is hardly surprising since an e-book has no pages and each e-book platform has different sizes of screen.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about ebooks; however, your comments led me to google the topic using Word to create ebooks and, in the first paragraph, it indicated "using styles to create.....". Here is the link I refer to: http://www.pcworld.com/article/25361..._an_ebook.html.

Now, if that article is all hogwash and does not work...well, I digress. I just thought was interesting in that you say it would not work (i.e., stripping format) and the article mentions that it does.

In any case, I will step back and hopefully, someone else can help you.

Word doesn't have "reveal codes," so you have to apply a different logic. In the Find and Replace dialog box in Word, ^p represents a paragraph mark (assuming that "Use wildcards" is cleared).

At least in theory, you can replace ".^p^p" with ".^p " (not including the quotation marks). But this will create a paragraph starting with three space characters, which is not the same as a first line indent in Word.

Getting rid of duplicate paragraph marks, via Find and Replace, and then applying the appropriate styles to text is a more convenient, long-term solution.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional