how to justify text

[pierret18811376]

Hello,

I have copied/pasted text from Word to Frame Maker, and selected "Justify" button in Frame Maker, but I have always some space at the right (see red lines) :

It is strange because I have made a "Paste special" and choosed "Plain Text" in "paste special dialog box".

How to paste without the Word formatting : my goal is to have the text without this space at the right, and make a real justify.

[Winfried Reng · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You have a bunch of separate paragraphs which all have only a single line.

However, to justify a paragraph you need more than a single line.

Therefore you should put everything into a single paragraph.

To do this you can search for \p (that's the pilcrow "character" at the end of a paragraph) and replace it by a space. Or, if you want to keep your line breaks, replace by \r (that's a manual line break).

Generally you should use the paragraph designer and format everything with dedicated paragraph formats.

You should not format something manually. This can get lost.

Best regards, Winfried

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You're not getting any Word formatting - you've just pasted in plain text - however, as Winfried says, you've got multiple lines with returns in that text, so you need to strip them out or replace with soft returns as he suggests. Right now each of those lines is its own paragraph, so they will respond accordingly when you apply a paragraph tag to them.

[pierret18811376]

Hi all,

I have succeeded to do it by using search/replace like this :

In fact, the content of my Word file was coming from a PDF file : I had copied and pasted text from the PDF to Word, then from Word to Frame Maker. So all these paragraphs breaks were coming from the PDF. Do you think there is a better way to copy text from PDF and paste it inside Frame Maker without having these paragraphs breaks ?

[frameexpert · Accepted solution]

Instead of using the clipboard, try saving the PDF as a Word file. Then you can import the Word file into FrameMaker or you can copy/paste from Word. It may eliminate the hard returns.

[Barb Binder]

Salut Pierre:

Yes. In Adobe Acrobat, use File > Export To > Word or RTF.

There are two Word options. If you end up doing this a lot, try all three and then pick the best one for your document. If it's a one off, it's not that big a deal. 

~Barb

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

And if you're doing a lot of copy/paste from Word, you can do the edit hack on your maker.ini file to re-arrange the paste order so that plain text is the default when you CTL-V paste.

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Hi Pierre:

Again, the key is to export to Word (or RTF), not copy.

It's always possible that the returns were in the original document that was converted into a PDF, but it's not likely in 2023. It's something that users used to do a long time ago. (And most of us volunteering here lived through that painful era.)

There's nothing wrong with using find a replace to fix it, but you have to be really careful that you don't combine different paragraphs into a single paragraph. At least in the old days when people would put returns at the end of a line, they would also add double returns between paragraphs, and you could leverage that in the find and change to keep the paragraphs intact.

~Barb

[pierret18811376]

Hi Barb, Hi Frame Expert,

the PDF I am using is made from a scan. I have made the scan by using Acrobat Pro. 

From Acrobat Pro, if I do file/export/Word, in the exported word file I have this problems : in the exported Word file, Acrobat adds some section breaks, that I am obliged to remove in Word (by Find/Replace).

You are right : it is better to use Acrobat/Export to Word in order to keep the document formatting, and I see that it does not add a paragraph break on each line.

An thanks to Winfried for the Find/Replace use in Frame Maker.

In order to learn : how to remove a section break inside Frame Maker ?