Wildcard Find-and-Replace: Fixing Extra Spaces in a Manuscript
Submitted by Dawn McIlvain Stahl on Mon, 02/04/2013 - 8:44pm
It comes as no surprise to copyeditors, but readers of the world may not know that many writers still use two spaces between sentences. Some writers even pepper their manuscripts with strings of extra spaces. I call that move lazy-thumb syndrome. At some point before the text is published, those extra spaces need to be stripped out. More often than not, that point is at the desk of a copyeditor. Thankfully, changing two spaces to one is quick and easy and doesn’t even require advanced techniques. Changing variable numbers of extra spaces can also be quick and easy—if you use a simple wildcard find-and-replace.
If you just want a low-tech way to change two spaces to one, open the find-and-replace box, put your cursor in the find field, tap the spacebar twice, put your cursor in the replace field, tap the spacebar once, and click replace all. Done. You can do a few similar find-and-replaces to clean up variable strings of extra spaces (start with the longest string first), but I recommend this all-purpose extra-space cleaner:
PROBLEM
Your manuscript has strings of multiple spaces where single spaces should be.
FIND
Type one space followed by {2,}. The curly brackets define the number of occurrences of the previous character (the space). Two to four spaces, for example, would be {2,4}; two to ten would be {2,10}, and so on. Since we want any string of spaces to be found, we’re signifying two or more by leaving the end of the range blank: {2,}.
REPLACE
Type one space. It won’t show up, but Word knows it’s there.
Don’t forget to check "Use wildcards"!
Visual Summary
To replace any string of multiple spaces with one space:
CHEAT SHEET
Curly brackets: used to indicate the number of occurrences of the previous character; can be used to find exact numbers of specific characters (four of them = {4}), or numbers of a particular range (two to ten of them = {2,10}), or any number of occurrences above and including a particular number (two or more = {2,})
Sorry I cannot concede under way (as an adverb) as one word. That's wrong.
Comments
Wildcards
Anonymous
Just posted on facebook, but thought I should do here, too. :)
You don't need the wildcards. You can just enter two spaces (again, they won't appear, but they are there) in the Find field, and then enter one space in the Replace field. Click "Replace all" and voila. If you're worried about changing things that ought not to be (although there are few good reasons for using the space bar to space *anything*), you could enter a period with two spaces (and then a period with one), then a question mark with two, then an exclamation point, then a colon. It takes just a minute or two.
It works the same with quotation marks: Enter " in the Find field, then " in the Replace field. All changed. Ditto for apostrophes.
Posted on Tue, 02/05/2013 - 2:07pm
Thank you!
Anonymous
I never knew! I find searching out and then changing 2-space sentence breaks to be among the most tedious on my plate. Somehow this trick has eluded me. I look forward to getting my next big Word doc to edit that has random two-spacers and waving my magic wand.
Posted on Thu, 02/14/2013 - 11:44am
Low-tech search and replace
Dawn McIlvain Stahl
Yep! That's the method I tried to explain in the second paragraph. But for catching all the various strings of spaces, the wildcard is worth it's weight in annoying wildcardness. I didn't bother with it when I was working on mostly book-length manuscripts, but when I started working on multiple shorter docs every day, the multiple searches just to clean up spaces in each one was becoming a huge annoyance. I linked this wildcard search to a shortcut key AND I worked it into one of my overall clean up macros. So much more peace in my editing world now! ;-)
Posted on Thu, 02/14/2013 - 12:42pm
Magic wand away!
Dawn McIlvain Stahl
It's a simple thing, but can make a big difference. Enjoy!
Posted on Thu, 02/14/2013 - 12:44pm
Find and replace white space
Anonymous
Word 2003 does not understand the curly brackets (braces). I usually search for "white space" (the search symbol is ^w) and replace it with a single space. That finds and replaces any combination of spaces, tabs and optional spaces. I can't use this trick when I need tabs in the text, but--more often than not--I don't want the tabs that someone has typed. If one part of the manuscript needs tabs, I select all the text that doesn't need tabs before running the Find-and-Replace operation.
There are some idiosyncrasies to know about this tip. White space includes 1/4 em and optional spaces, but not em or en spaces. White space also includes tabs, but not the tabs that are automatically inserted when invoking the Format > Bullets and Numbering command.
Posted on Sun, 02/24/2013 - 6:17am