Trim trailing spaces in MS Word and LibreOffice

If you like to deliver clean documents, you probably sometimes display invisible characters in Word. In such occasions, you may have seen lines or paragraphs ending with ·¶. Yes, because a document is not only written but also manipulated and changed a number of times, having trailing spaces is not a rare thing. One of my development reflexes is to trim those, but Word does not provide any tool to do that automatically. Or does it?

The (almost) useless advice #

A quick search yesterday gave me things that seemed clueless to me:

• “Align to the right, trailing spaces will be visible and you’ll be able to remove them by hand.”
• “Display invisible characters, trailing spaces will be visible and you’ll be able to remove them by hand.”

In a summary, “make the trailing spaces visible and remove them by hand.” That may be tolerable for a two-page document, but is not acceptable for a three-hundred-page one. If you see those advices for your large document, forget them (the first one especially, as it may wreak havoc in your layout).

My solution for MS Word #

Word allows to search and replace special characters (see here to discover how and have application examples). Knowing this, removing trailing spaces becomes a problem of determining the correct search pattern. You can bring up the Replace window with the Ctrl + H shortcut.

To remove all your trailing spaces in MS Word, search and replace all ^w^p with ^p. Execute Replace All several times (until Word says nothing was changed; each execution will remove one trailing space at the end of all lines).

• ^w is a whitespace (normal, non-breaking…).
• ^p is the paragraph mark (the ¶).

You can also replace all ^w^l with ^l, though this has a higher risk of breaking your layout, espacially if your text is justified (^l is the carriage return ⮐).

What about LibreOffice Writer? #

The solution is even easier for LibreOffice Writer. That is, if you’re familiar with regular expressions. There again, we’ll use the Replace tool (same Ctrl + H shortcut as before).

In Other options, check Regular expressions.

In LibreOffice Writer, you can replace \s+(\r?(\n|$)) with $1 to remove all trailing spaces. A single execution should be efficient this time.

The expression can be decomposed this way:

• \s+ matches one or more whitespaces;
• (\r?(\n|$)) matches a carriage return (\r?\n) or the end of a paragraph (\r?$); \r? is there only to be compatible with Windows carriage return format;
• $1 is the first captured group ((\r?(\n|$))) as it was found in the text (we put back what was found).

Regular expressions are a vast topic I won’t go furhter into here, but don’t hesitate to ask questions I may answer.

I hope this post will help you.