MS Word Number of Spaces after a Period? 1

[jadedthief]

Hello all! I'm new, and this is a question that's been bugging me for a while. It's rather small but I'd love a bit of help with it.

I've been trying to figure out for a few weeks if there is any way to make Word automatically change the number of spaces inserted after a period. As I recall, it was an option in an older version, but my current one (2002 version) doesn't seem to have it. I've been requested to make all my documents have two spaces after periods, and I was hoping there was an easier way than to scroll through and put a second space in after every period.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Jaded Thief

 

[petrosky]

Hi Jaded Thief,

You may use Find & Replace in most versions of Word to accomplish this.

Find ._ (single space).

Replace .__ (two spaces)

HTH.

Peter

Remember- It's nice to be important,
but it's important to be nice

 

[TonyJollans]

Hi jadedthief,

You can use Find and Replace but changing a single space to two will, at the same time, change two to three so is not ideal. Better to check "Use Wildcards" and Find [blue]. {1,}[/blue] (dot space leftbrace one comma rightbrace) and Replace with [blue]. [/blue] (dot space space). This will force two spaces after each dot regardless of how many were there before (unless there were none - which you would probably not want to change if they were, say, numbers).

Enjoy,
Tony

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[pbrodsky]

One other point. The general consensus is that a single space after a period (at the end of a sentence) is the preferred usage.

There are several reasons given for this. If you do a Google search you can easily find several detailed explanations.

 

[macropod]

Hi jadedthief,

If you use any of the Find/Replace methods, its important to be aware that this will affect the spacing after abbreviations too (i.e. Mr. No. etc.). You might then need to correct these.

Whilst I accept that you might have been asked to do this, the only ones that are likely to notice are those who can see the Word document on-screen. As pbrodsky indicates, style guides these days suggest the use of single-spacing between sentences. The double-spacing between sentences is a throw-back to the days of typewriters using fixed-pitch fonts and no text justification - just like carriage returns at the end of every line and double carriage returns at the end of every paragraph.

Cheers

 

[cheerio]

A search for .^w will find all stops followed by any amount of white space. You can then replace with a stop plus the required number of spaces.

 

[Volk359]

The general consensus is that a single space after a period (at the end of a sentence) is the preferred usage.

Interesting discussion here: thread1256-891235

But ultimately I think it's up to the boss.

 

[Volk359]

And here thread1256-1054168