Re: Refilling paragraphs to remove hard returns?

[Jonathan Groll <lists@groll.co.za>]

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 07:50:55AM -0400, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
>I imagine this is a common problem, so I don't know why I'm
>having so much trouble finding an answer.
>
>Suppose I have a text document that I've worked on in
>text-mode. It is filled using the usual fill tools, so it
>wraps at 72 characters, with a hard return after each line.
>Paragraphs are separated by an extra hard return; there's no
>other indentation.
>
>I now need to give this document to someone who wants to work
>on it in a word processor, who complains that there are hard
>returns after every line. What's the easy way to remove these?
>
>Going forward, I could work on such documents in
>longlines-mode. But it's not clear how to fix what I have. The
>trick mentioned in the Emacs wiki of resetting fill-column to
>a large number and then refilling the region doesn't work,
>because each paragraph is seen as one line, rather than the
>block of text set off by two newlines. Yes, I can regex
>replace all examples of return (not followed by another
>return) with a space, but I'd think there must be something
>more organic.
>
>What trick am I missing?

I'm not sure why no-one has mentioned it but my Emacs (GNU Emacs
23.1.90.1) comes standard (I think!) with
unfill-individual-paragraphs:

unfill-individual-paragraphs is an interactive Lisp function in
`ourcomments-util.el'.

(unfill-individual-paragraphs)

Unfill individual paragraphs in the current region.

This sounds exactly like what you need.

Cheers,
Jonathan