Hi Fig,

Try a wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find =^13[ ]{1,}
Replace = ^p

An alternative is:


Find = [ ]{1,}([!^13]@^13)
Replace = \1

The first one replaces the spaces following a paragraph break - which is effectively the same as replacing spaces before a paragraph's text - except for the first paragraph in a Section or table cell. The second one replaces the spaces at the start of a paragraph, except for the last paragraph in a table cell. There is no Find/Replace formulation that will locate solitary 'paragraphs' within a table cell.

Your publisher probably also won't want multiple paragraph breaks (ie lines created by hitting the Enter key) between your 'real' paragraphs. You can clean those out with another wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = [^13]{1,}
Replace = ^p

Likewise, multiple spaces after periods, etc, for which you can use yet another wildcard Find/Replace, where:
Find = ( )[ ]{1,}
Replace = \1

Note: The correct way to apply the indented formatting you obtained via the spacebar is via first line indenting for the paragraph (eg Format|Paragraph), preferably by defining an appropriate paragraph Style and applying that to the paragraphs of interest. This is most likely what your publisher will do - along with specifying an appropriate before/after space setting for each paragraph.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Macropod,

Thanks for responding. I'll admit these find/replace things are new to me. I will research it.

However I wanted to run something by you. I wrote a small .net program that brought in parts of the word doc one character at a time. I found a paragraph by looking at the doc in word and found that at the beginning of paragraph there were two leading "spaces" (I'm not sure what the characters were-I wanted to find the ascii codes of these two characters thinking that there might be some garbage or some Word formatting characters)

The odd thing is that I found the last few charactesrs of the previous paragraph then an ascii 13 (a carriage return). At the beginning of the new paragraph with the two spaces, I could only see the first visible letter in the document that was in the paragraph's. In other words the two "spaces" weren't in the file.

As a test I went into a copy of the word doc. I was able to get rid of the "spaces" by backspacing over them.

If there is something I don't know, such as the fact that some of the formatting characters are not directly in line with the text, please tell me. I could go through this by hand but I'd rather not.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Fig000