Irregular spaces after pasting in ID

Question

When I copy text from either Word or Text Editor into ID, there are irregular spaces between sentences throughout the 200 page document.
I am a newbie to ID, but I have been trying a multitude of things to fix this...and still have the problem. Can someone please help?
(A little background...the person who sent me these files, sent them in individual emails in which I had to copy and paste in Word. They inserted spaces, returns, etc. manually.)

Answer 1

Some of us older folks who grew up with typewriters learned that you have to hit the return key (or worse...hit the carriage-return lever...GASP!) at the end of the line, and it could be that the person who keyed this in did that instead of letting Word do the automatic wrapping. How ever it got that way, Joel is right in that you need to remove them.
Another way you may consider is using Find/Change. Enter ^p into the Find field (that's the code for a paragraph return), place the cursor at the beginning of your text and hit the Find button. When it finds the first paragraph return, decide if you want to keep it or not. If you want to remove it, hit either the Change button, then the Find button to move to the next one, or use the Change/Find button to change and find in one step.
Without anything entered into the Change field, it will replace the paragraph return with nothing, which may or may not be what you want. If there is no space between the last character of the line and the paragraph return, you will likely get the last word of one line combined with the first word of the next line, and you really don't want to have to clean that up. Instead, consider replacing the paragraph returns with a space (by typing a space into the Change field). This may give you some double spaces to clean up later, but you can fix that fairly easily.
At the top of the Find/Change window, you will see Query:. If you click the blue arrows to the right, you can select from a number of GREPs. One of them is Multiple Space to Single Space. If you choose it, it will load a bunch of code into the find and change fields. If you hit Change All, it will find any instance of two spaces or more in a row and change them to single spaces within the selection, story, document or what ever you have selected in the Search: field. If there is any reason you need some instances to remain two spaces or more, don't use Change All. Instead, use find, change, find next, change/find or which ever combination you're comfortable with. You may find that people who hit return at the end of each line also use two spaces after each sentence, which is also a typewriter convention that we don't use any longer in electronic typesetting. This is a good way to fix that problem too.
Also common are two returns to separate paragraphs, which should be done with paragraph spacing, but that's another story, so one step at time.