Thursday, March 10, 2016

Moving On; Word Joiner Update

The Goodreads Giveaway ended on the 29th, and I sent the books to the people that Goodreads selected. I hope they read them, and that they post a review, although my experience hasn’t been all that stellar.

I sent the current version of Discoveries to my reader. Maybe it’s been long enough it won’t seem like it’s all familiar. After her changes, I’ll publish the ebook and fork the paper version. But now, it’s time to go on to Princess, and finish it up.

Word Joiners
A comment on the topic of the word joiner being used to keep em dashes from being split from the word they follow: I haven’t found a good way to search for an em dash without a word joiner. Searching for the absence of something has never been a strong point in the software I’m familiar with. Open Office shows the word joiner character as a shaded vertical line between the letter and the em dash, but while those make it obvious where I have included it, it doesn’t do much for searching. In Scrivener, the word joiner can be detected by moving the cursor (with the arrow keys) through the em dash; the cursor will not move for that one character when the word joiner is detected (since it's invisible, after all).

In addition, I’m not an expert on regular expressions (used by both Scrivener and Open Office) by any means, and I’m sure a search string can be constructed to find em dashes not preceded by a word joiner, but I took the (in this case) shorter path, and searched for every letter followed by an em dash, in sequence.

As always, comments welcome!

2 comments:

  1. You might want to take a look a TeX, an open source typesetting program. For information about the program check out this site: https://tug.org/

    Phil.

    ReplyDelete