Thread: Paragraphing from Text

I have some PDF books/stories that weren't formatted well, so that the paragraphs are stacked on top of each other instead of having a line between them. I want to print some of these, and make them as readable as possible.

If I copy from PDF and paste into Word, or convert from PDF to Word, is there a way to separate each paragraph by putting a line beneath it, separating it from the next? An example is below.

This is how it looks now:

It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her
bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds
scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating
wraith- like shadows that raced along the ground.
The house shook.
Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.
She wasn't usually afraid of weather. —It's not just the weather, she thought. —It's the
weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.
School. School was all wrong. She'd been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That
morning one of her teachers had said crossly, "Really, Meg, I don't understand how a child with
parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don't manage
to do a little better you'll have to stay back next year."
During lunch she'd rough-housed a little to try to make herself feel better, and one of the
girls said scornfully, "After all, Meg, we aren't grammar-school kids any more. Why do you always
act like such a baby?"
And on the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one of the
boys had said something about her "dumb baby brother." At this she'd thrown die books on the side
of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse
torn and a big bruise under one eye.
Sandy and Dennys, her ten-year-old twin brothers, who got home from school an hour earlier
than she did, were disgusted. "Let us do the fighting when it's necessary," they told her.
—A delinquent, that's what I am, she thought grimly. — That's what they'll be saying next. Not
Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father—
But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her
mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, "When your father gets back—"
Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were saying, must be
aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg. But if it did she gave
no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity other expression.
—Why can't I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?
The window rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt dose about her. Curled up on
one of her pillows a gray fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head under
again, and went back to sleep.

This is way I would like it:

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her
bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds
scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating
wraith- like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

She wasn't usually afraid of weather. —It's not just the weather, she thought. —It's the
weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.
School. School was all wrong. She'd been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That
morning one of her teachers had said crossly, "Really, Meg, I don't understand how a child with
parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don't manage
to do a little better you'll have to stay back next year."

During lunch she'd rough-housed a little to try to make herself feel better, and one of the
girls said scornfully, "After all, Meg, we aren't grammar-school kids any more. Why do you always
act like such a baby?"

And on the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one of the
boys had said something about her "dumb baby brother." At this she'd thrown die books on the side
of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse
torn and a big bruise under one eye.

Sandy and Dennys, her ten-year-old twin brothers, who got home from school an hour earlier
than she did, were disgusted. "Let us do the fighting when it's necessary," they told her.
—A delinquent, that's what I am, she thought grimly. — That's what they'll be saying next. Not
Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father—

But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her
mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, "When your father gets back—"

Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were saying, must be
aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg. But if it did she gave
no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity other expression.

—Why can't I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?
The window rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt dose about her. Curled up on
one of her pillows a gray fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head under
again, and went back to sleep.

Hmm...

SNB, I found my problem with your code; I had it in a module in NORMAL. When I moved it to a module for my document, it worked. However, it worked the way Abousetta described, creating the impression of double-spacing, not paragraphing as intended.

Would there be a way to do it based on line-length? I'm no expert in Word, but isn't there a limit to the number of characters that can exist in a line (determined by font and margins). So, if a line is less than, say, 95% of the max characters, we can assume that's a paragraph end, and plug in a paragraph mark?

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's run into this problem. If Word can't do it, do you know of a non-Word based approach that might work?

Still desiring a solution.

That would probably straighten it up a lot, but it wouldn't catch the ones where the line begins with a capital letter.

Going with my earlier thought, could I copy the text into Excel, and somehow get each line into a cell of it's own, then do LEN to determine length, plug in a symbol (say, a tilde) in the cell to the right of the cells with the least characters, assuming those are paragraph endings, then paste back into Word and replace the tildes with a paragraph symbol?

I'm definitely in favor of an easier solution if it's out there.

I'm all in favor of using Word's VBA, but am completely lost here.

So, how would we test the first character in each paragraph? I'm not even familiar enough with Word's VBa to get started.

Hi
I use this code in Word to quickly reformat imported text where lines import as paragraphs. It:

• replaces paragraph marks with spaces where they precede a word that does not begin with a capital letter (note this removes breaks intended to precede lower case letters, eg dot points. You might want to sort those out separately)
• Removes paragraph breaks between commonly capitalised words and phrases
• removes para breaks after words unlikely to precede a para break (such as 'and')

you might want to save your file before you try it!

Sub imported_paras_quick_reformat()
Dim ToRep, RepWith, vv, n, ww, an

For Each pp In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
    pp.Range.Characters.Last.Select
    Selection.MoveEnd (1)
        On Error Resume Next
        If Selection.Characters(2).Case <> wdUpperCase Then Selection.Characters(1) = " "
    
Next

'find commonly capitalised phrases and words unlikely to precede a paragraph break and removes following breaks

'common capitalised phrases
vv = Array("Mid West",  "South West", "Australian Government", “United States”, “United Kingdom”)
'words unlikely to precede a paragraph mark
ww = Array("the", "and", "is", "are", "of", "a", "if", "at", "in", "then")

For n = LBound(vv) To UBound(vv)
    Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
    ToRep = Replace(vv(n), " ", "^p")
    RepWith = vv(n)
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = ToRep
        .Replacement.Text = RepWith
        .MatchCase = True
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
    
Next n
  
For an = LBound(ww) To UBound(ww)
    Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
    ToRep = " " & ww(an) & "^p"
    RepWith = " " & ww(an) & " "
  Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
  Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
  With Selection.Find
    .Text = ToRep
    .Replacement.Text = RepWith
    End With
  Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
Next an
  
End sub