[John Goche]

Hello,

I have an ASCII text (.txt) file in DOS format with each text line
terminated by a carriage return character and line feed character.
Inside the text file, paragraphs consist of consecutive nonblank
lines and are separated by one or more blank lines. When I open
the file with Microsoft Word 2007 the line delimeters seem to
persist since if I highlight a paragraph and try to justify the
text so that both the right hand side and left hand side of
the text are align, Word just justifies each line individually,
that is, does nothing since each line by itself is by definition
already justified. Thus I would like to eliminate all line delimiters
appearing between nonempty lines. I could delete them one at a
time, but this would be time consuming as some of the paragraphs
in the original text file have quite a lot of lines. I would prefer it
if there
were a way to be able to highlight a bunch of consecutive nonempty
lines and delete all line delimiters (i.e. invisible delimiting
characters)
found therein by pressing a "merge lines into paragraph" button or
something similar from within Word. This would have the effect of
merging the highlighted lines into a proper Word paragraph. Is
there a way to do this in Word?

Thanks a lot for all your help,

John Goche