Removing MS Word page breaks.

Kind of a shot in the dark here... I think ^12 is the code for page break.

Try doing a Ctrl-H search and replace, with ^12 in the "Find what" field and nothing in the "Replace with" field (leave blank).

You might have to experiment, e.g. maybe the page break and the following paragraph control code need removed depending on how they were entered, so try ^12^p in the "Find what" field if a blank line remains.

Don't save your doc until you're sure it's worked OK, and/or save to another filename!

-Derek

Have you tried turning on the option to see formatting marks? When it's on, you can see the page breaks. Just select them and delete them.

What caromora said. Go to Tools->Options->View. Select ALL for Nonprinting Characters.

Then in your document, the pagebreaks will look like this:

............................................Page Break......................................

Select that and delete.

dpaterso said:

Kind of a shot in the dark here... I think ^12 is the code for page break.

Click to expand...

It's ^m for manual page breaks and ^b for manual section breaks.

try to: Copy/Paste Special/Unformatted Text
I am almost sure that it will work

In Word 2007 The view formatting marks tool is on the Home ribbon. Do a Find ^m and delete them as Word finds them.

Are they automatic page breaks or page breaks that you created on purpose? That is, are page breaks themselves the problem or just where they occur?

Automatic breaks such as those associated with a chapter style? If so, open up the style and edit it to take out the break before.

chrischance said:

They are mixed.
The manual ones I inserted between chapters have been deleted following the help on here but the automatic ones are still there.
I have now got the doc on normal view and the auto breaks show as a fine dotted line. I have tried finding ^m and that worked for the 30 chapter breaks. My prob now is with the automatic page breaks.
I'm still experimenting. Thanks for the help.

Click to expand...

"Automatic" page break do not actually exist for you to remove. They are produced by a combination of the paper size, margins and text of the document and are not in themselves characters.

If you are preparing an MS for ebook format, you do not need to remove "automatic" page breaks. The things you will need to remove are:

- Manual Page Breaks ^m
- Section Breaks ^b
- Formatting that "Inserts Page Break Before". [Rare]

You can spot the difference between "Inserts Page Break Before" and the kind of page break you don't need to worry about because if there is "Inserts Page Break Before" formatting, the preceding page will likely have text which finishes halfway through the page. It is exceedingly unlikely you will have this on a document you created yourself, but if you do the simplest solution is to change the style of the first line of the new page to "Normal" and then manually apply any formatting you want to it.

kurzon said:

- Formatting that "Inserts Page Break Before". [Rare]

Click to expand...

This may be rare with chrischance, but is certainly not rare in general, as many people use the insert page break before with the chapter heading style, and the best way to get rid of it is to edit the style, not to manually change the formatting on the page.

Julie Worth said:

This may be rare with chrischance, but is certainly not rare in general, as many people use the insert page break before with the chapter heading style, and the best way to get rid of it is to edit the style, not to manually change the formatting on the page.

Click to expand...

Indeed it is, but it does not sound like that would have been appropriate advice in these circumstances, as the OP does not appear to use Word at that level. And, particularly in relation to formatting a document for publication as an ebook, at times it can be better not to use a style (particularly if the style is "Heading 1" which is a universal style and can be defined differently from machine to machine).

Ebook formatting appears to involve a lot of "get rid of all but the most basic formatting".

This is also a fairly rarely used setting. Many skilled Word users, particularly novelists, may perhaps use it - but I would actually be very surprised if the majority of Word users knew that it was possible to set a style to automatically include a page break before.

[Oh, forgot to mention another "page break" possibility - sometimes very new users of Word make "page breaks" by hitting Enter until they're on the next page. You might want to do a search for multiple returns, as I gather that is another thing that ebooks don't like (blank areas).]