Must correct a big mistake

[Jason]

I have just finished a 300 page novel. I made the mistake of leaving
only one space instead of two after each and every punctuation mark.
Can anyone suggest a remedy that will save me going back to correct
each and every instance of this error in manuscript formatting?

 

[Elliott Roper]

I have just finished a 300 page novel. I made the mistake of leaving
only one space instead of two after each and every punctuation mark.
Can anyone suggest a remedy that will save me going back to correct
each and every instance of this error in manuscript formatting?

Before you go nuts, check with your publisher. Most would prefer a
single space. The publisher will place the text in InDesign or Quark
and those will automagically adjust the space at the end of a sentence
to match their house style. Two spaces is a hangover from fixed width
typewriter styles for submitting manuscripts.

If you insist, you will probably need a macro that loops over the whole
document searching for
[a-z]. [A-Z] and on finding such a string steps back one character and
adds another space. That will miss lots of examples, like quoted
speech, questions, sentences that end with a digit and exclamations.
Just hack your macro and repeat.

Test it on a copy.

 

[Andy]

Why can't he just use find/replace? Search for stopspace, replace
with stopdouble space. Replace all. Then repeat with ! ? etc. Or am
I missing something?!

I have just finished a 300 page novel. I made the mistake of leaving
only one space instead of two after each and every punctuation mark.
Can anyone suggest a remedy that will save me going back to correct
each and every instance of this error in manuscript formatting?

Before you go nuts, check with your publisher. Most would prefer a
single space. The publisher will place the text in InDesign or Quark
and those will automagically adjust the space at the end of a sentence
to match their house style. Two spaces is a hangover from fixed width
typewriter styles for submitting manuscripts.

If you insist, you will probably need a macro that loops over the whole
document searching for
[a-z]. [A-Z] and on finding such a string steps back one character and
adds another space. That will miss lots of examples, like quoted
speech, questions, sentences that end with a digit and exclamations.
Just hack your macro and repeat.

Test it on a copy.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Why can't he just use find/replace? Search for stopspace, replace
with stopdouble space. Replace all. Then repeat with ! ? etc. Or am
I missing something?!

Not a lot. I wasn't thinking 'novel'. I wanted to eliminate numbered
bullets and other stopspace sequences that were not sentence ends as
far as possible. I also wanted to avoid turning stopdoublespace into
stoptriplespace.
If Jason never had any of that, then your method would be far easier.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Search for period, space, any uppercase letter followed by any other letter
and you will not get a problem with non-sentence periods.

So Search for
.. [A - Z][a -z]

And replace with ." " (without the quotes).

This is described in the help topic "Type wildcards for items you want to
find".

As Elliott says, check with your publisher first: most would prefer an em
space or other combination of fixed spaces, rather than two soft spaces, in
that position.

Cheers

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Thu, 17 Jul 2003

Not a lot. I wasn't thinking 'novel'. I wanted to eliminate numbered
bullets and other stopspace sequences that were not sentence ends as
far as possible. I also wanted to avoid turning stopdoublespace into
stoptriplespace.
If Jason never had any of that, then your method would be far easier.

Please post all comments to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]