David Gillaspey
Mon., Jun. 20, 2005, 12:04 pm
Hi Greiggy,
Thanks for the additional detail. I understand now what the problem is.
I am able to reproduce the problem you are experiencing. So I'll start by explaining what's happening.
First, it's important to understand that in a word-processing program, returns are actual characters, albeit normally invisible. (You can, however, choose to see return characters, by turning on Word's "Show Invisible Characters" option. [This is "verbal shorthand"; I'm not saying the feature is called exactly this.])
Since a return is a real character, you can search for all returns in a file and replace them with some other character or characters. That's the key to the ineloquent solution I'll explain below.
The problem you are experiencing occurs because when you paste text into Dreamweaver, by default it converts all these invisible returns to the <br> tag. It surrounds all the copy with a single pair of <p></p> tags, rather than doing this on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Since there is only one <br> tag after each paragraph, your text appears closed up, as you say.
Then, in Dreamweaver, when you manually hit the Return (or, on the PC, the Enter key), Dreamweaver inserts the </p> (at the end of a paragraph) and <p> (at the start of the next paragraph) tags (actually before the existing <br> tag, which is odd). That's why you get the double spacing.
This points to a feature that Dreamweaver sorely lacks: the ability to take paragraphed copy and automatically surround each paragraph in it with <p> and </p> tags upon a paste operation. There may be a Dreamweaver extension that does this, however.
Anyway, one solution is to use Dreamweaver's own Find/Change command to search for instances of </p><p><br> and replace them with </p><p>. Be sure to search in the Source Code, not text. Unfortunately, when I tried this, it left </p><p> at the end of paragraphs, rather than putting the <p> at the start of the next paragraph.
So try this solution: in MS Word, you search for paragraph returns (that actual character I've mentioned) by searching for "^p" (without the quotes) ? or possibly "^l" (without the quotes; the second letter is the lowercase of "L"). I mention both possibilities because I have had to use both in different circumstances. Regardless, in Word's Find/Change dialog box, there is a place for specifying a variety of "Special characters," including paragraph returns.
Search for all instances of paragraph returns, and replace them with:
</p>^p<p>
(or possibly)
</p>^l<p>
The point of this is to add the necessary HTML tags to the text before you paste it into Dreamweaver.
(Note: add an extra line of space above all the text first, else the first paragraph won't get the <p> tag in front of it.)
Then, when you paste the text into Dreamweaver, be sure to use the "Paste HTML" option under the Edit menu, else you'll get the <br> tags again.
Now, that's not a very eloquent solution, but it works. It's possible you could use a Word macro to automate it. Also, if you are using a Mac, BBedit (http://www.barebones.com/index.shtml) might have a feature that would do this for you.
For the PC, consider:
http://www.tucows.com/preview/376599
http://www.tucows.com/preview/316293
http://www.tucows.com/preview/390891
and NoteTab (http://www.fookes.com/notetab/index.php)
I believe the latter is the current incarnation of software for Windows that I previously used (but the name of which I could never remember) and found to be very powerful.
Sincerely,
David Gillaspey
President
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