When pasting copied material from a PDF into an EN abstract field, it usually brings over carriage returns/line breaks for each line, even if no other formatting is carried across. It takes a lot of time to go through and remove the line breaks to generate continuous abstract text. Anyone have an effective technique for getting rid of these embedded line breaks?
A long annoying “feature” of copying PDF text which is a carriage return character and not “formatting” per se.
Once you have a number of these, you can select (and only leave those “showing”) the records that you want to remove the carriage returns from (you can temporarily create a group of them, as an easy way to keep track of the ones needing this cleanup), and use the “find and replace” (this is in the edit menu and available when you are viewing the library view) on the abstract field (and perhaps you might need to do some on any cut and pasted title fields?). In my experience you search for Special character carriage return, and replace with space. If you want to preserve true paragraphs you might want to first search for double returns, save to a funny character, remove the rest, and then replace funny character with a carriage return.
It would be nice if the developers could make a tool to accomplish this automatically,
Thank you! I think your Find & Replace recommendation is a great solution. Many of the records I work on that need the abstract reformatted end up in the Unfiled folder until I move them to a group anyway, so using the Find/Replace option on just the records that show up in the Unfiled window ensures that those are the only records that get revised with this approach, which is the outcome I was looking for. And, once a person gets used to the Find/Replace dialog box, it’s pretty quick to implement, and a space can be put into the Replace box so that removing the carriage returns does not splice all the lines together without leaving a space between the lines that are being joined. Works great as far as I’m concerned! Thanks again.