1 Topic by A.T.Schlesinger (edited by A.T.Schlesinger 2016-11-25 13:49:46)

Topic: Gremlin hunting!

"Gremlin" is what my beloved editor calls those 100s of little mistakes you make in writing: leaving out words (She picked ___ the book and read..."), homonyms and homophones (The night put on his breastplate and grieves and readied himself for the battle!) and comma splices (She, along with her, friends, didn't know what to, do.)

I have a new gremlin that is plaguing me:

As most of you know, formatting a book for Createspace, or some other e-reader, goes batshitcrazy when you commit the sin of putting an extra space at the end of a line and hitting return. (...and they all died.[space][Return/Enter]

Is there an easy way to find these and kill them? Double spaces are easy; I can enter .[space][space] on Find and navigate right to them. I could also do this with .[space], but then I get 10,000 little yellow marks. That's work, but I have an allergy to hard work.

I use Word 2010.

Any secrets I don't know?

Quote Post 1

Re: Gremlin hunting!

I assume you use Find and Replace (Ctrl-H) to locate all those little bugs. You can search for .[space]^p and locate a single space behind a period and before a hard Return.

To do that, for the Find What box, click the "More" button at the bottom. When it opens up, click the "Special" button. You will find all sorts of special characters, para marks, and doo-dads to search for. You can add these at any point in actual text for the box.

You can do the same for the Replace With box.

It makes finding and editing much, much easier. Once you get to know the special characters, you don't need the extra mouse movements as you can remember most of them. ^p is just one of them (An end-of-sentence Enter key).

~Tom

Quote Post 2

3 Reply by A.T.Schlesinger (edited by A.T.Schlesinger 2016-11-25 17:29:57)

Re: Gremlin hunting!

Yes, Ann, I was using the paragraph marks. Thanks.

Tom, you are my new favorite person in the world! That WORKS!! Thank you so much!

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!. If I were a billionaire, I'd buy you a room on the International Space Station!

EDIT: Tom, thanks to you, I found 33 of those "extra spaces."

EDIT EDIT: Did I say 33? Add another 14 after quote, question, and exclamation marks. Dahum.

Tom, is there a way to find an extra space at the START of a line? (More rare, but I occasionally do that as well.)

Quote Post 3

4 Reply by Tom Oldman (edited by Tom Oldman 2016-11-25 17:54:20)

Re: Gremlin hunting!

Happy to have helped. I've been using Word since it first came out for Windows 3.1. Oddly enough, searches of that type do NOT work with Open office Writer. I have no idea why they didn't carry that functionality over.

EDIT: Sure, just reverse the search terms:  ^p[space]. There is no rule that says you have to have text in front of the "^p". You can even use combinations like ^p^p.

EDIT EDIT: For more elaborate search missions, you can use a free program called "FileSeek". It lets you search an entire folder filled with Word documents and locate the search terms in ALL of them at once. You cannot change anything, but it will help you locate the items you need to find. It keeps you from opening files you don't need to open.

URL:  www.fileseek.ca

~Tom

Quote Post 4

5 Reply by A.T.Schlesinger (edited by A.T.Schlesinger 2016-11-25 18:10:10)

Re: Gremlin hunting!

Tom Oldman wrote:

EDIT: Sure, just reverse the search terms:  ^p[space]. There is no rule that says you have to have text in front of the "^p". You can even use combinations like ^p^p.

Yep.  That worked. Found a few of those as well. Thanks!

EDIT: Did I say a few?  I meant 35!! *face palm**

Quote Post 5