How can I flatten (remove textboxes) from a .rtf ?

[joesh]

Hello,

I have a Microsoft word document saved in .rtf format. This document was the output I got from an OCR program that I used to use. I no longer have this OCR program.

The document is wonderful - it contains all of the text of the item I scanned in, and the layout, etc., is exactly right. In short, it's perfect.

Except that every word, or group of 2-3 words, is in its own textbox. So everything _is_ text, and I can select it all and cut and paste it, but if I cut and paste the line:

Here is a line of text in this document

It pastes as:

Here is a

line

of text

in this

document

So what I am asking is very simple: how do I take an rtf document, and tell word to "flatten" it - that is, how do I tell word to just drop all of the textbox information ?

Again, all the text is there, it is _actual text_, and it is lined up just fine. I can see it, touch it, feel it, etc. - all I want to do is tell word "take this document, don't change anything, just drop the useless textboxes surrounding each group of words"

thanks.

[joesh]

ok, from another forum, someone told me that I could:

Do a find and replace and get rid of the extra carriage returns. If you have to, turn multiple returns into another character fist, then get rid of the single return (replace with a space, or not) then replace the character you used for the double returns with a single.

Can anyone verify that this is a reasonable solution ? I am going to try this myself tonight, but it strikes me as odd that textboxed text is nothing more than text with some extra carriage returns ... does that seem right ?

thanks.