Using Libre Office 7.5.1.2 How do I remove the gray spacers in these documents. I copy the prose from an email and paste it into a Libre Office document and it looks like this: Use a colon and end with a short independent clause. Just now the gray spacers were replaced by **
The grey spaces probably are a non-breaking space (create with Ctrl+Shift+Space). They are coloured grey so you know they aren’t a normal space but they don’t print or export as grey, just like field shading.
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You can replace them using Find and Replace. In the Find paste the grey space; in the Replace field enter a normal space.
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Or, you could upgrade to a current version 24.8.2.1 of LibreOffice where they default to looking shading can be turned off to make them look like a normal space, see ReleaseNotes/24.8 - The Document Foundation Wiki.
Cheers, Al
Please note: This ask-site is based on Discourse and allows you to use Markdown-syntax, where text wrapped by pairs of ** is rendered bold.
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I used backticks to show the double * above… In your question only the last one is shown.
Non-breaking spaces and “ordinary” spaces are handled differently by Writer. Non-breaking spaces can ruin your text layout and have disastrous effects on justification.
You are encouraged to replace them with ordinary spaces as suggested by @EarnestAl.
You usually get non-breaking space when pasting from web pages, which is the case if you connect to your mailbox through webmail protocol (using a browser). Also you may also get paragraph breaks at end of every line which, again, ruins layout (unless you want an exact duplicate of the email look in the browser, though it depends on the browser window width).
I tried selecting the gray non-breaking space with the intention of using “Find All” and the replacing, however I could not use the “Copy” command. It would not select the gray space.
Place the cursor directly after the grey space and drag back to include the character immediately before it. Copy and paste into the Find field, then place the cursor at the end and Backspace once.
Alternatively:
You still don’t know if it is a non-breaking space or if it is another special character. If you place your cursor directly after the grey space and press Alt+X it will convert the character to its Unicode number, e.g. a non-breaking space, , will become U+00a0. Copy it. Pressing Alt+X a second time will convert it back to its original form.
- Paste the Unicode number, assume
U+00a0for this example, into the Find field. - Delete the
U+portion and replace it with\uso the Find field reads\u00a0 - In the Replace field enter a space from the keyboard
- Expand Other options
- Tick the box Regular Expressions
- (optional) Tick the box Current selection only if you want to search within a selected portion of text.
- Click Replace All button.