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Winter 2013 Rummage Box


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  • 2 weeks later...

Wayne

I'm not sure whats different in either the Rummage Box or my brain, but lifting stuff from the Rummage box is not working like it used to. When I copy items it looks like the carriage return information I don't need comes with it and I'm left with each sentence being a new paragraph. How about a short tutorial on easily getting items from the Rummage Box into my editor.

Thanks

Bill

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Sorry I missed you yesterday Bill, was sick all day. Let me check it out.

Ok Bill, I opened the RumBox file, copy and pasted the Bob Parrish article into a word file and also a publisher file (see PRF's attached). The only problem I had was while copy and pasting Bob's picture. I had to do that a couple times before it would paste. Don't know what's up with that. You guys are much smarter than me on this stuff. What am I missing here?

Wayne

PS, as a reminder, sometimes I have to use "microsoft word" to reformat (clear formatting) Rumbox articles. I don't know why, it's just easier for me that way.

Bob Parrish.pdf

Word PDF.pdf

Edited by R W Burgess (see edit history)
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Wayne

I'd rather convert the rummage box article into text and paste the text into my newsletter. This way I can format it and make it look neat. In the old days, maybe last fall, I could do that. Now when I make it text it is sort of a mess that I have to remove the carriage returns from. I get the feeling that the format of the Rummage Box has changed.

Bill

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Wayne

I'd rather convert the rummage box article into text and paste the text into my newsletter. This way I can format it and make it look neat. In the old days, maybe last fall, I could do that. Now when I make it text it is sort of a mess that I have to remove the carriage returns from. I get the feeling that the format of the Rummage Box has changed.

Bill

How do you convert the PDF to text? The Publisher format of the Rummage Box is the same. There is always a chance that the web site itself may create some new problems. (It has undergone some changes)

Edited by R W Burgess (see edit history)
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How do you convert the PDF to text? The Publisher format of the Rummage Box is the same. There is always a chance that the web site itself may create some new problems. (It has undergone some changes)

I just open the rummage box issue I want, select the text and copy it. I paste it into notepad so all the formatting gets stripped out and all I have is the text to then copy and paste into my newsletter. I can then set the type to match the rest of the letter. The problem is the carriage returns. It does not seem to matter if I turn word wrap on or off, I still have to delete the carriage return from the end of each line to make the text flow. I can do it, but its tedious and we should make it easy to get these executive writings into our local newsletters.

The Museum website is displaying text. It was easy to lift the Motorcycle exhibit article and get the text without the carriage returns.

Bill

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......... The problem is the carriage returns. It does not seem to matter if I turn word wrap on or off, I still have to delete the carriage return from the end of each line to make the text flow. ............The Museum website is displaying text. It was easy to lift the Motorcycle exhibit article and get the text without the carriage returns.

Bill

Bill, I'm not sure what carriage is? When I pasted the article shown in both my publication PDF page as well as the microsoft word PDF page, they came out as shown in my attachment. The microsoft word PDF has duplicate copies. The left text box is as pasted. In the right text box I justified the print. Pretty much every time I paste into either page I have to "clear the formatting" to make it compatable to my publication. Can you send me an example of carriage?

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Let's try this...

Uploaded Rummage Box directly from my PC.

My apologies for dragging on this discussion, but I think we can improve the Rummage box article format and make it more usable. A typewriter carriage return is when a typewriter operator grabs the carriage return handle and simultaneously throws the carriage back and moves to a new typing line. A carriage return is a character that is sent to a mechanical printer to similarly start a new line of print. It sort of grew up to be a paragraph mark in a word processor and in Windows character code its a mark that forces the text after the mark to be written on a new line.

I opened your link above and cut and pasted Chuck's article out of the pdf into a notepad. I then copied Eric's into the same window below Chuck's. You can make the window wider and narrower and the text in Chuck's article grows and shrinks to match the window size, but Eric's does not behave as nicely.

If you copy and paste both articles into a Word file, then display all formatting marks, you can see that Eric's article has paragraph marks that are forcing a new line at the end of each of his line of type. These paragraph marks were what was making the handling or Eric's article clumsy. It would work better for me if the Rummage Box articles are all done like Chuck's and do not have those extra unnecessary character controls.

Bill

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My apologies for dragging on this discussion, but I think we can improve the Rummage box article format and make it more usable.

No apology necessary, Bill. We are here to help each other.

A typewriter carriage return is when a typewriter operator grabs the carriage return handle and simultaneously throws the carriage back and moves to a new typing line. A carriage return is a character that is sent to a mechanical printer to similarly start a new line of print. It sort of grew up to be a paragraph mark in a word processor and in Windows character code its a mark that forces the text after the mark to be written on a new line.

Understood, but I have never used a typewriter! :)

I opened your link above and cut and pasted Chuck's article out of the pdf into a notepad. I then copied Eric's into the same window below Chuck's. You can make the window wider and narrower and the text in Chuck's article grows and shrinks to match the window size, but Eric's does not behave as nicely.

If you copy and paste both articles into a Word file, then display all formatting marks, you can see that Eric's article has paragraph marks that are forcing a new line at the end of each of his line of type. These paragraph marks were what was making the handling or Eric's article clumsy. It would work better for me if the Rummage Box articles are all done like Chuck's and do not have those extra unnecessary character controls.

Bill

Ok Bill, I'll give you a little history. The Rummage Box articles are provided by our 21 different Board members during the year. They are sent to me, and I do a little editing. I sent them to RumBox editor, Jan Kamholtz, and she does some more work on the submissions to best make them work well in our issues. Since we have 21 different people sending these articles in, there are different types of files, word, word perfect, etc. involved. We work with what we get. I'm not sure if Jan reformats every one or not. I must say I have never heard of your problem before.

Now, in this post, I have attached 3 files, one each of Chuck's and Eric's. These first two I have squeezed the text box to make the type "connect box" link to the second page. Both Eric's and Chuck's seems to do the exact same thing. The 3rd PDF file, I pasted both articles in one publication, also squeezing the first text box to make the article link to the second page. As you can see, we did lose the paragraph indentation and spacing on each PDF file. I see no other difference in either one of the articles, though. They both look the same to me.

Now, since we are in the public domain, I am asking if anyone else sees a problem or has had the same problem as Bill has. We certainly need to make sure that our editors can easily use the material provided for them.

Wayne

Chuck File.pdf

Eric File.pdf

Chuck Eric combined.pdf

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Wayne,

Look at the example below to see what happened when I copied Chuck's article into Word. This happened whether I just PASTED the information into Word or used PASTE SPECIAL.

post-30694-143141788752_thumb.jpg

Notice that at the end of each line, a carriage return or line feed mark is showing (a backwards P).

Bill,

I am going to assume that you are trying to paste the article into either Word or Publisher. Instead of pasting the article into Notepad, go ahead and paste it into Word or Publisher. Your file should look like my example above. The easy way to remove all the extra carriage returns at once is to do a FIND/REPLACE (CTRL +H). Turn on the display the formatting marks. Depending on how the file appears, do one of the following:

1. Assuming that paragraphs are divided by an extra paragraph mark

In the Find box, type ^p^p; in the Replace box, type ^l (small L); click Replace All.

2. Assuming there's a space between the last word on each line and the paragraph mark

In the Find box, type ^p; clear the Replace box entirely; click Replace All.

3. if there's no space between the last word on each line and the paragraph mark

In the Find box, type ^p; In the Replace box, type one space (you won't see anything); click Replace All.

One word of caution: instead of Replace All, I would do just use Replace. The reason is the article you are pasting into Word will use a combination of the above three choices (usually #2 and #3). Using Replace will cut down on the number of edits.

Removing the paragraphs' marks with FIND/REPLACE saves you one step and eliminates the extra paragraph marks all at once.

Hope that helps.

Judy

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Thanks Judy. I tried everything that I knew and could not get those "characters".

To Bill's original question, is there a way to enter the Board member articles in the Rummage Box issues to prevent these carriage's from showing up?

Wayne

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Wayne,

I could not cut and paste any text from the last three PDFs you attached. When I open any of those three PDFs the text is all seen as a PDF image and the individual words can not be copied.

Bill,

This problem is related to how a particular editor treats line breaks vs. paragraph breaks. Some editors treat them exactly the same (and thus a carriage break at the end of each line) while others tag the two breaks differently.

There are two methods we use to remove carriage returns from text copied from PDFs:

1) If you have access to Microsoft Word 2010 cut the text you want from the PDF and then paste it into a Word document but make sure you use the "Merge Formatting" Paste option.

The above is a cut and paste into Word 2010 of some of Eric's text. You can see by using the Merge Formatting option the text is copied with paragraphs and line breaks intact.

You can then use this pasted text as is or you can now cut and paste this text to an editor such as Notepad if desired.

2) We often use a free online website which strips carriage returns from text you cut and paste into the webpage. This webpage even has several choices for execution to let you choose the best conversion for stripping out the carriage returns. We find that the "every paragraph begins with a capital" works the best for us most of the time.

Here is the website--> Online Removal of Carriage Breaks

Bob

Edited by vwlfan (see edit history)
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Guest Jan K.

As Wayne stated, I get files from hither and yon. To bring the text over from those articles, I typically copy the text, and then select "Paste Special" and choose "unformatted text." When I took over the Rummage Box I was given a copy of the Publisher file used to create the most recent issue, and I've been using that as my template for subsequent issues.

Going forward, I will check the formatting and remove any/all errant hard returns (which appear as Paragraph symbols when you click on the "Reveal Codes" button). I usually find a few along the way when paragraphs shift on me, but I'll be more proactive about eradicating them.

Wayne, it is much easier to copy/paste from a Word or Publisher file than from a PDF. Is there a reason we couldn't offer editors, upon request, just the text from each issue in a plain Word document? That might eliminate some of the formatting issues the editors are experiencing.

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I use Publisher. (My sympathies to those using Word for a newsletter). When I cut and paste into Publisher, publisher often puts each line in its own text box. Thankfully, Notepad is really stupid. I use it to strip out all the formatting and usually when I copy from anywhere into Notepad, then copy into Publisher I get raw text I can format as I wish. My issue here was with the carriage returns. If nothing else, this discussion has highlighted this so that editors can now know what to do when these quirky things occur. Thanks to everyone for your attention to this.

March is done and in the mail. I'm gonna take a break for a couple weeks and get my hands dirty.

Bill

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Thanks Bill for alerting us to this problem. And, Bob (VW), I wish you had mentioned your problem earlier, as we want all editors to be able to use AACA material whenever you can.

Jan, Judy, and I will be doing a little more research on this subject to see if we can improve things.

Wayne

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  • 4 weeks later...
Wayne: I was looking to use several articles from the Winter Rummage Box and wanted to use the photos as well, of the authors, but I am unable to copy them.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Linda

Linda

On my Windows 7 machine, I can copy a screen to my clipboard by pushing the Print Screen button. I'm not sure if I did something special to make this work or not. I open the Rummage Box, scroll down to Wayne's beautiful picture, then hit print screen. Go to Publisher or Word and hit control V or paste. You'll get the tiniest picture, but you can crop it back to what you want and then make it bigger without loosing any of the magnificent quality.

Bill

Iroquois Region, AACA Inc - Home

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Bill I tried your suggestion on this Windows 7 machine, but got the complete page instead of the photo only.

Let me find some more info on this situation after lunch today.

Thanks. Linda, we'll work on it. BTW, Linda, send me your e-mail address.

Wayne

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Bill I tried your suggestion on this Windows 7 machine, but got the complete page instead of the photo only.

Let me find some more info on this situation after lunch today.

Thanks. Linda, we'll work on it. BTW, Linda, send me your e-mail address.

Wayne

I was not clear Wayne. You will get the entire page. Then use Word to crop it back to just your beautiful picture. (Click on the picture, then Format>> Crop)

Works for me

Bill

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Bill, as Judy suggested you can copy and paste from here.......

Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) - Officers & Directors Roster | About AACA

The pictures are a little small, which creates fuzzy pictures when enlarged.

Whew, finally got that PDF up (remember, this web site will not allow you to upload a 14 page document, DUH!) As you can see, the pictures are fuzzy. Does not hurt me, cause I'm already ugly, but Tammy Cox would not like our AACA President, and her her young handsome husband to appear as he does in this PDF!? Right? :)

Wayne

BOARD MEMBER PHOTOS TRY AGAIN.pdf

Edited by R W Burgess
crap, lousy speller this morning, can't get pdf to upload.....UGHHHH! (see edit history)
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