Consolidate Text Boxes /text/sdraw/01/consolidatetext.xhp text box consolidation join PDF lines;text box consolidation combine text box;text box consolidation combine text frames;text box consolidation

Text Box Consolidation

Combine two or more selected text boxes into one.

Select two or more text boxes and either Choose menu Shape - Consolidate Text. Open context menu and choose Consolidate Text.

Text box consolidation joins several text boxes into a bigger text box, enabling text reflow inside the resulting box. Consolidate text command is specially useful for editing PDF documents with %PRODUCTNAME Draw. The function inspects the text fragments to see if they end in sentence-ending punctuation. If not, then the next text box's content is appended to it instead of starting a new paragraph. You must afterwards fix up paragraphing, and set paragraph properties.

Remarks

The resulting text box is inserted into the current layer. If the single text box objects are named, the resulting text box is unnamed. Title and description of the single text boxes are lost. The previous text box objects are deleted after consolidation. Consolidation of lists requires attention to restore the list layout that has been affected by the position of the punctuation. This includes the case of numbering of style "1.", where the resulting list items are split after the dot. For better results, combine adjacent text boxes with similar paragraph formatting. Character formatting inside the text boxes is preserved. Combining text boxes with different paragraph styles (headings, list and more) will require manual intervention to restore the original text layout.