How to delete trailing spaces in one go?

[Combs, Richard]

Bodvar Bjorgvinsson wrote: 
 
> I thought I had seen in this list a discussion on how to 
> remove trailing spaces that so often come with Word documents 
> that are either imported into FrameMaker or opened by 
> FrameMaker (by conversion). I have a plethora of these and 
> the closest I have got is to:
> Find: Text: ". \p"
> Replace: Text: ".\p"
> but this results in the new \p taking on the paragraph 
> attributes of the next line, removing extra vertical space or 
> changing to superscript if next line starts on a superscript.

I vaguely remember that discussion, but can't find it. I recall being
tempted to object to the idea then, so I think I'll do so now. 

I'm in the habit of always typing a space at the end of a paragraph, and
I can't imagine why one would need to remove them. In fact, there are at
least two situations in FM where you really should have a space before
the end of the paragraph: 

-- When text adjacent to the pilcrow (end of paragraph symbol) has a
character format applied to it, the format change affects the paragraph
itself, marking it as an override. A space between the text and the
pilcrow avoids this override (as long as the char format isn't applied
to the space, of course). 

-- When a text inset sits adjacent to the pilcrow, an update of the text
inset causes the paragraph in which it sits to take on the format of the
first paragraph in the text inset. A space (or anything else) between
the text inset and the pilcrow avoids this problem. 

Besides that, if you get in the habit of always ending a sentence with a
space, then merging two paragraphs doesn't cause two sentences to
collide. 

What am I missing? Why do people not want those spaces? 

Nowadays, bytes are pretty cheap, and your thumbs can use the exercise.
:-)

Richard


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Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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