How to Remove Multiple Returns (Paragraphs) and Replace With One Adobe InDesign

In many situations, we’re accustomed to hitting return twice when we want to have an increase in spacing. However, this doesn’t work out too well when we’re adjusting our paragraph spacing manually. Those multiple markers in a row can reduce the amount of control you have over your paragraph spacing.

Luckily, InDesign provides us with an easy way to remove them.

First, I’m going to turn on hidden characters so you can see them. You can do this with the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+i or on Mac Cmd+Opt+i. You can also go “Type” and at the bottom “Show Hidden Characters”.

To remove the multiple markers, I will select my text frame and then I’m going to go to the “Edit” menu at the top, and use “Find/Change”.

This opens a new dialogue box. In the dropdown at the top, InDesign provides you with some preset options to clean up your text. We’re going to use “Multiple Return to Single Return”.

You have a few options in what you want InDesign to search. In the dropdown, we have “All Documents”, “Document”, and “Story”.

All Documents refers to when you are using an INDB file, or an InDesign Book. This compiles multiple InDesign documents together to output to a single PDF.

Document means it’s going to search through every text frame in the document itself.

Story means it’s only going to search through the current selection. If your text has multiple threaded frames, it’s going to do through all of them. A Story in InDesign is continuous text, even across multiple frames.

There are buttons below this dropdown that can further narrow your search.

Once you’ve selected your settings, just hit “Change” and all of your paragraph markers (called a pilcrow) will be removed and replaced with one.

And you can see below my paragraphs are completely fixed.