Why can't I 'justify' text that I have copied from PDF into MS Word?

Question

I find it really annoying that when I copy text that looks good in Adobe Reader into Word, the sentences which are left-aligned by default won't change accordingly when I press 'Justify'. The only way I could get the result I need is to press back-spaces and Delete key to align the right border. Why is this?

Here's an example from the Word document. The text is right- and center-aligning perfectly but Justify does not seem to work.

Solution 1

It looks like the text has been pasted with carriage returns at the end of each line.

This would probably happen even if you did a paste-special and only kept the text.

I think the best you can do is select the text once pasted, then do a search-replace. To search for a carriage return, use

^p

So that is the carat symbol on shift-6 on a US keyboard, and when combined with p means carriage return. Replace this with a single space to remove the line breaks.

Solution 2

The easier way, since the one given here still demands some corrections of some words that end up stuck together, is to copy the text from the pdf file, paste it in google search box, and then copy that one and paste it on your word file. basically the pasting in the search box clears the formatting of the original text.

Comments

[Uday Kanth]

Thanks but it does not seem to be the issue. It says there are no ^p's in the text.

[Paul]

@UdayKanth Must be something else, can you turn on "Display all formatting marks" which is in Tools / Options / Display in most versions of word. Then take another screenshot with the formatting marks enabled?

[BJ292]

Just on the off chance you got the ^p bit wrong try it this way - go to find & replace - select special - select paragraph mark - stick a space in the replace with box - click replace all. I think Paul was right - it's almost certainly paragraph marks.

[Uday Kanth]

@BJ292 Thanks for that! It worked! I wonder what made the difference between manually typing ^p and choosing it from the list.

[coolharsh55]

@BJ292 - that also removes all the paragraphs from the text. options are to select each paragraph or insert a special symbol like eg @#$ before each paragraph, and after justification, replace this with the paragraph mark