I have written a document containing at least 200,000 words. I am told that before publication, I need to copy edit the spaces between exclamation marks and words, and unnecessary spaces between words. Does ‘write’ have some facility to correct for this, without me having to trawl through everything again?
What do you mean under:
a) copy edit the spaces; and
b) unnecessary spaces?
Should there be no space at all between a word and exclamation mark, or should there be a small non-breaking space?
Good question, I can add to that question, At the end of a sentence does the exclamation mark come first or the full stop? If a character has finished speaking and straight away another character starts speaking,Libre write always puts a space otherwise you get two speech marks the same. Strange!
What I mean gabix, is in the narrative I have left too many spaces between words,particularly after and before exclamation marks. I dont wish to copy write the whole thing again,and wondered if Libre has some way of justifying this.I cannot get find and replace to do this even on an individual level.
If you mean replacing multiple spaces with a single one, this can be done with the conventional find and replace. However, there is a bit more convenient macro in Andrew Pitonyak’s macro document.
If you have written the document pressing the space bar before each exclamation mark won’t Find & Replace solve that problem by just searching for “ !” (space-exclamation) and replacing with “!” (exclamation)? Or the other way round if someone wants spaces you haven’t put in.
Unnecessary spaces between words is more tricky if your document has intentional spaces produced with the space bar. I can only suggest setting Find & Replace to search for two successive spaces, and replace at one space and then facing up to stepping through the document finding each double space in turn and deciding whether it should be replaced before moving on to the next double space.
Find & Replace can of course also deal with other things you might have done, like useing three spaces where there should only be one.
Making full use of Writer’s Styles & Formatting can reduce this kind of problem. Your 200,000 word text is as it is so it is probably a bit late in the day to be tackling that, but it is well worth exploring how Writer can help you lay out your future writing.
My first port of call was to find&replace, but try though I did, with verying combinations it only seems to work with words even though I have ticked hyphenation as well. its looking like there is no answer to this problem. does anyone know if ms word can justify incorrect spaces?.
I fear I am confused… I have tried both the LO’s standard Find & Replace and the add-on Alternative searching. Both find and replace ! marks with or without adjacent without spaces, and single or double spaces, without ticking anything on my Windows7/LO5.3 system. I haven’t thus far thought of anything adjustable that would change this, though I suppose that if one of the “Other options” is ticked that might upset the search. Does anyone else have a better idea?