One fell swoop (rather than lots of shallow ones)

September 27, 2009 11:56 AM

I'm dealing with English/Chinese bilingual documents in OpenOffice, 100+ page ones, and I need to get all the Chinese characters out and into another document. I'm either looking at 2-3 hours of deleting, cutting, and pasting, or maybe there's a shortcut?

I've got one Writer, one Calc.

The Writer, I just need to gut it all out so I have a clean English document without goofy GBK mucking up the formatting.

The Calc, I need to move all the Chinese out to a Writer document, strip out the cells, and get a clean Chinese-only document for a word-count.

H4LP! I don't want to be doing this all night!

My OOo, as far as I know, is up to date.

posted by saysthis to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

In a copy of your document, replace each occurrence of each letter of the alphabet with a space. Then replace each double space with a single space, repeat until you have your characters.
posted by leafwoman at 3:02 PM on September 27, 2009

Response by poster: In a copy of your document, replace each occurrence of each letter of the alphabet with a space. Then replace each double space with a single space, repeat until you have your characters.
posted by leafwoman at 7:02 AM on September 28 [mark as best answer] [+] [!]

Definitely! I've done that before on Documents I needed in Chinese, but this time the end result I want is English.
posted by saysthis at 10:10 PM on September 27, 2009