Ever noticed when you copy something from a Word or OpenOffice document into other publishing platforms that you never get what you see? Let’s replace carriage returns first.
1. Step Open Office or OpenOffice
2. Step In this case we use OpenOffice, but it will work similarly in Office. Hit CTRL + F and now comes the clou
There are various things you can replace:
- $ = Regular carriage returns
- \n = Soft returns
- ^$ = empty paragraph
- \t = Tabs are
With the four instructions above, we are not perfectly capable of preparing our document to copy it into publishing platforms like WordPress, Drupal and so on.
In my case, I wanted to make sure that when copying text into the WordPress HTML editor that it would keep the original line breaks. For that, I replaced every regular carriage returns with two soft returns.
This is what it would look like:
Now you will see that your document has a lot of new empty lines, but that’s ok, because when we copy the text into our publishing platform the new line breaks will disappear and everything that is left will be the original paragraphs with the correct line breaks.