Something I find myself doing quite a lot these days is starting to write a text in Emacs Org-Mode which I then expect ‘normal’ people to contribute to or view. (By ‘normal’ I mean the perfectly nice but less enlightened who have been duped into sending kilobytes of markup data thanks to the Word .doc or .docx format, along with their content). Because I don’t want to frighten them with a perfectly harmless, valid and platform independent text file, especially when most OS’s throw a hissy fit if they encounter a .org suffix, I tend to paste what I’ve made into an OpenOffice file and save it as a *.doc file. This means that I’m having to lose the line breaks / carriage returns that Emacs helpfully puts into my text every 80 characters or so. This is how you do it:
- Open OpenOffice Writer
- Paste your text from Emacs in
- Go to Format – AutoCorrect – AutoCorrect Options
- Select or make sure ‘Remove blank paragraphs’ is selected
- Click ‘OK’
- Select all text (ctrl-A)
- Go to Format – AutoCorrect – Apply
- Bingo (I hope)
Note: I’m using OpenOffice 3.2 on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)