Tidying up your ellipses
These articles are to aid writers who do not wish to
pay a formatter, or would rather have a much smaller formatting fee, or who
need a fast turnaround (badly formatted manuscripts take longer and are
sometimes moved down the work-pile).
Once you have removed any bloat as in ARTICLE #1 the
next step is to make the layout epub- and Kindle-friendly. Save the document
under a new name before you begin, so if anything goes wrong you still have the
original.
Firstly we should change any ellipses formed by 3
periods (...) into proper ellipses, which are formed by pressing the Ctrl, Alt, and Period
keys together, thus: …
To make this change, search for 3 periods by typing 3
periods into the Find and Replace search field; then click Find Next.
You then block over the first one you find in the
document and then key in the Ctrl, Alt, and Period keys to change it to a
proper ellipsis (…)
This done, you now block over and copy the new, proper ellipsis (Ctrl
and C keys) and then paste this (Ctrl and V keys) into the Replace field
in Find and Replace. So now you have 3 periods in the Find field and a proper
ellipsis in the Replace field.
You now click on the Replace All button and these are
now all changed.
The next step is to remove any extra periods (if there
were 4 periods in some of your instances) by copy and pasting the proper
ellipsis into Find and adding a period after it. Click Replace All and
then remove the period in Find and place a period before the proper ellipsis. Click Replace All and now we are done.
But to make sure that any ellipses do not get stranded
on a new line, in e-formatting it is a good idea not to have any spaces either
side of the ellipses (though this is not essential). To execute this, type a
space character after the ellipsis in Find and then Replace All.
Next, you remove the space character in Find
and place a space character before
the ellipsis, then select Replace All, and you are done tidying.
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