Is there an easy way to get rid of blank lines in word 2008?

I was going to past the text into a html file but it has so many images in the document as well.

What happens if you open the word doc in a text editor? Like notepad. Find what is making the line breaks and do a find and replace on all of them.

Find and Replace

This will get rid of absolutely every paragraph and line break. (The difference is a whole ‘nother question that is not important right now). You can put them back in where you want to separate paragraphs.

In the Find and Replace box, you can’t type a paragraph or line break. Instead, a paragraph break is represented by ”^p” (without the quotes) and a line break is ”^l” (that’s a lower case L)

1) Replace paragraph marks with spaces
Put ^p in the Find what: box
Put a single blank space in the Replace with: box
Replace All

2) Replace line breaks with spaces
Put ^l in the Find what: box
Put a single blank space in the Replace with: box
Replace All

2) Replace double spaces with single spaces
Put two blank spaces in the Find what: box
Put a single blank space in the Replace with: box
Replace All

Save the document as a 97–2003 word doc first and THEN turn it into a pdf file.

They might not be blank lines. They could be paragraph formatting that calls for space before and/or space after the paragraph.

Click the paragraph symbol (¶) at the top of the screen to show formatting symbols in your document and actually see where the paragraph breaks are. If you have extras, replacing will work, as @jaytkay says. If you don’t, then you will have to go to the Format > Paragraph specs to change the paragraph spacing.

If you see manual line breaks (little right-angled arrows that point down and to the left, created by Shift-Enter), you can use Replace on them to change them to paragraph breaks and then get rid of double ones (replace two with one) and/or change paragraph formatting. When replacing, use “Special” in the Replace menu (under “More”) and choose Manual Line Break. This is also where you’ll find the codes for the other formatting characters if you don’t remember the ones that @jaytkay has listed.