This is a question about using Find and Replace (F&R) in Word, where I want only ONE paragraph mark (?) at the end of each paragraph. I usually set the “view” to see paragraph marks. When I do a F&R, there are some that it doesn’t “find.” They LOOK JUST LIKE paragraph marks on screen, but apparently they’re not. I have discovered an additional code, which is represented in F&R as ^13. I have to replace those ^13s with a “real” paragraph mark, in order to be sure I’m getting one paragraph mark per paragraph.
This may sound like minutiae, but here’s an example of when it’s frustrating. I just formatted a document to have a 12 point spacing after every paragraph. And yet I still had “paragraphs” without space after them, even though I could see a paragraph mark on-screen. I had to replace the faux paragraph mark (the ^13) with real ones, in order for the space setting to take effect.
What IS the purpose of these ^13 codes? How can I be sure I’m not putting them in? This document in question was one I myself typed. I hit the enter key after each paragraph, yet some of them are ^13s. [Note: the only place you get the ^13 is by typing it into the “find” blank in Find and Replace. It may be ASCII, as 13 represents a carriage return in ASCII.]
Additional frustration: even though F&R doesn’t find the ^13s, they sometimes function like paragraph marks–that is, they can create an extra line space. I have noticed that the last paragraph mark in a document is a ^13. Does anybody else hassle with this?
