Forced line breaks

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    • #96708

      Hi,

      I have some PageMaker files, in which the text has a lot of forced line breaks. We want to upgrade them to ID. While copying the text from PM and pasting that to ID, we get the lines broken where the breaks were there. We don’t want the forced line breaks copied to ID. How to solve it?

    • #96709

      Do you mean that the line breaks stay the same even if you delete the forced line breaks/soft returns?

      Or if the forced line breaks/soft returns come through, why not just search and delete them?

      Or delete the them in the PageMaker file before copying and pasting?

      EDIT: If it’s the first (i.e., line breaks stay the same with the line breaks/soft returns deleted, then you can try to recompose. I think the keyboard shortcut is (command-option-/ [Mac] ctrl-alt-/ [Windows]).

    • #96711

      Hi Harris,
      I would prefer…

      Or if the forced line breaks/soft returns come through, why not just search and delete them?

      I should be able to search and delete them in ID.

    • #96714

      Do you mean how? In the find field, click on the arrow next to the @ sign on the right. Scroll down (2 spots I think) to forced line breaks. Leave the change field blank. Replace all.

      The search code for soft returns/forced line breaks is ^n

      EDIT: I should mention that the majority of people have a space band before the soft return/forced line breaks. That makes life easier. If that was not done in the original file, you may have to replace the ^n with a space band and then search for two spaces and make into one. Watch out for words that were hyphenated manually and use a forced line break. You may have to search for -^n first and fix them manually to take out the hard hyphen.

    • #96718

      Hi Harris,
      Thank you for your immediate response.

      I shall explain my issue fully.

      In the PageMaker file, the forced line breaks exist. But when I copy and paste the text into ID, the forced line breaks turn to be simple line breaks. Thereby, I am unable to use ^n to find them out.

      Any solutions?

    • #96722

      Ah–they turn into hard returns?

      I think you may need to go into the original PageMaker file and delete the forced line breaks there.

      What version are the PageMaker files? InDesign CS6 and later is supposed to open and convert PageMarker files simply by opening and the files are converted. I don’t know how well. Maybe no need to copy and paste? I think ID CS6 (and later) can only open PageMaker 6 or 7 files.

      https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/converting-quarkxpress-pagemaker-documents.html

    • #96726

      /I think you may need to go into the original PageMaker file and delete the forced line breaks there./

      Yes, this works best. Thank you very much.

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