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Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

How to use Find & Change to remove double spaces after a period or full stop.

Daniel Walter Scott

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So one thing to check when you are working on a document, especially if you've got it from multiple sources, is that some people like to put double spaces after a full stop, and some people have single; single is the more common, double is kind of, throws back to old school typing stuff. It don't really matter, except we want consistency through our document.

So, how do I know there's double spaces in here? I know because I put them in there for this example, but whenever I'm working, one of the last things I do, just to make sure I'm getting my layout going, I might just need to double check they're all single spaces. Let's have a quick little look.

If I go to 'Type', 'Show Hidden Characters'-- I'll zoom in a little bit. Now, that didn't work. Even though it's ticked on, it's because I have the W key on. So W gets rid of hidden characters. You can see in here, see that, double dots after all the ending there. It's gone up to three. We're going to go through and adjust those.

So we're going to go to 'Edit', 'Find/Change', and we're going to look at this 'Query' along the top here. Earlier we looked at 'Multiple Returns' but there's also 'Multiple Spaces'. And we're going to hit 'Change All'. It's going to go through, make 15 replacements, and you'll see they're all gone, nice.

While we're in here, looking at 'Find/Change', there's a few other things up here that could be useful for you. If you are a bit of a type nerd and say, an 'Em-dash', it's the width of the M. The 'En-Dash' is the width of the N. So M is wider. So it's the longer dash. Some people fake it by putting dash dash, ' --' in because they can't work on the keyboard where that longer one is, the 'Em-dash'. So you can go through and say, actually just find all those and replace with the more proper 'Em-dash'.

Other things in here, 'Phone Number Conversion', I get a lot of stuff for the US, and lot of things have that dots in between the numbers, and I want to switch it out for spaces. 'Trailing Whitespace' is an interesting one. All that is, is when people get to the end of-- say they're typing in Word, and they get to the finish of their story, they put in lots of return, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I don't know why, just, we'll do it right, it's like, "I really mean that this is the end." You only need one return, but we put in lots, and that's 'Trailing Whitespaces'. All these kind of extra returns at the end of documents. There's just a way in there to go, find, change, and remove it, but if I'm honest, I've never used that. Just interesting, I guess.

Let's leave it there. Let's move on to the next video.