Forum Discussion
Text not behaving normally in Word after author edits.
I'm an editor using Word on Mac (Ventura). Manuscript files sent to me by a Windows Word user seem to be altered inexplicably. He copy/pasted the text from a Final Draft file (which is a screenwriting program based on Word technology), which is stupid to begin with, but works just fine normally. I can't replicate the issue just doing that. But then, he EDITED the file to prep it for me. He can't explain anything odd he's done, but the file is weird.
Word won't recognize most of the paragraph marks ¶ which are VISIBLE when in show/hide mode. I see them with my eyes (they're shrunken a bit), but Word doesn't see them. It only picks up about 2,200 paragraph marks in a file filled with about 3,200 known paragraphs when I do a find or find/replace for ^p.
Also, where there USED to be paragraph marks in the original in Final Draft, some are replaced with two spaces as if it's just a new sentence.
The author tells me he only made word-choice changes. Nothing to the format. And he swears he did not remove all the missing paragraph marks. Nearly 1,000 ¶ are not showing up in the find/replace, but there are also hundreds of others that have been removed completely, some replaced with two spaces, others just replaced with one space. Again, the author swears that wasn't his doing.
- I've tried copying/pasting the text into SIMPLE TEXT in TextEdit, but it doesn't make a difference. Still messed up. In fact, it doesn't recognize any of the ¶ marks I can SEE in Word, so it makes pages into just one huge paragraph. Same if I copy/paste back into Final Draft.
- I've tried changing the format > paragraph layout & nothing works.
- I've changed the fonts.
- I also tried this on Monterey before upgrading to Ventura, AND I tried this on my old Mac which is on Mojave with an older version of Word. Same results.
Nothing I can think of works.
This author spent many hours making his edits. I can't account for what he did/didn't do to create this problem, but I also can't ask him to re-do it all. I will lose him as a client if so, even though this is a problem he seems to have somehow created.
When I can SEE the paragraph marks, & they DO create a line break, why can't WORD see them????
scriptpreneur I guess I knew it because I have been using Word for nearly 40 years.
^13 is a represetation for ASCII Character Decimal 13, which is Carriage Return
While for a document created in Word, ^p would normally be used to find Carriage Returns, if the text originated from some other application, ^p sometimes does not work and it is necessary to use ^13.
Also, if performing a Wildcard Find and Replace, it is ^13 that must be used to file Carriage Returns (but if something is to be replaced by a Carriage Return, it is ^p that must be used.)
- Search for ^13 rather than ^p
scriptpreneur I guess I knew it because I have been using Word for nearly 40 years.
^13 is a represetation for ASCII Character Decimal 13, which is Carriage Return
While for a document created in Word, ^p would normally be used to find Carriage Returns, if the text originated from some other application, ^p sometimes does not work and it is necessary to use ^13.
Also, if performing a Wildcard Find and Replace, it is ^13 that must be used to file Carriage Returns (but if something is to be replaced by a Carriage Return, it is ^p that must be used.)
