I'm getting so specific with my interests that I'm nigh-unintelligible to what's outside of them. :')
Currently, I'm customizing LibreOffice to better fit my regular behaviors. I am inside of a 150,000 word document, trying to find all double (or higher) empty lines so they can be replaced with singular, empty lines.
Because this involves specifically looking for multiple, empty lines in a specific pattern, this is beyond the program's inherent "Find and Replace" function, so I downloaded an extension that could handle what I'm asking for. And... I think it's working?? However, it's been processing this action for the past 20 minutes, showing a progress bar for "found paragraphs/loop" that is now at 711,000+. But... I have no idea what this number is that it's counting?? And I do not know how long this should go on for, so I don't know if it's stuck?????? That number is bigger than the word count.
I have the urge to ask someone who has used this extension if this particular function is supposed to take this much time, but (1) this extension is used for many different kinds of "find and replace" actions, and (2) I imagine the usual size of a document this is used on is probably less than 150,000 words... PLUS!! Most people aren't going to have gotten this extension to begin with!! The inherent "find & replace" is enough for most people. As such, there's no way to get a sense of estimated time, because the action is not one that is usual. So, I'm watching the "found paragraphs/loop" number go up and up and up, wondering if I should've made a macro for this instead (except my last macro for this didn't work, which is why I tried this instead!!).
It feels like automatically changing the number of empty spaces in a document shouldn't be complicated, and yet! It seems to be. I just didn't want to do it manually because... manually going over 150,000 words is a lot for a task that is menial!! 😭
Gonna let it keep going for a few more minutes before trying to figure out alternatives.
