how to restructure unstructured text in WORD

I have several WORD documents that I have converted from PDF format, and the results generally look like this (and worse...):

"As with the ENTRIES operand of the LISTCAT command, you can substitute the asterisk wildcard
for one of the qualifiers in the specified data set name. This lets you list information about
more than one data set, but only if their names have several qualifiers in common. "

Is there some function in WORD that will reformat this data into normal paragraphs? I thought that there was, but of what I have found, nothing seems to work well if at all... How would you go about straightening this out with the least amount of effort? Macros? "MS VB macro editing "?

 

Try turning on Editing Marks in Tools > Options to see what is at the end of the lines causing problems, then use the Replace function to replace them with spaces.

 

whitphil;

thanx for suggestion, but long story short, paragraph marks are the culprit, and generally about one third of them are valid and they are interspersed randomly throughout, so the replace would have to be done one at a time...

I guess that a viable repaginate or reformat function, if they exist, would do the same thing as a "replace all ", so I guess the only easy solution is to somehow avoid getting all those invalid paragraph marks inserted on the conversion from PDF to WORD. Hmmm...does anyone know of a freeware util that maybe accomplishes just that???????

 

How did you move it over in the first place?

And, try this email cleaner

It "might" do the trick.

Cut/paste from the Word doc, and see if the cleaner is smart enough to clean it up?

 

thanx whitphil...

In answer, the original PDF document had a couple of methods to migrate the text: one was a "save as text" option and there was also an option to "copy to clipboard ", and of course I tried both to no avail.

The ecleaner did help, but the solution is to find freeware that will transform the data cleanly. I did download a trial shareware package, but it only converts 10% of the file on that basis.

Anyone know of a good freeware PDF converter? On first glance, they seem to be non existant...

 

I've never tried this, but..

On this site try giving it the PDF to convert to a Web Page. Then do a Save as and then open that Save as in Word? And then convert it to a DOC file??

Also, this is a list of apps that perform conversion from PDF files. I have no idea how many are free, have a trial period, ....