Find Spaces

Category: Document preparation

From time to time you may get a poorly formatted document with several contiguous spaces used instead of tab characters or line breaks. To make the document more suitable for translation, this command allows you to find such occurrences and replace them with one space or tab character. It searches the document for the next sequence of spaces (as specified in the settings) and selects the first found sequence. You may then edit it manually, find the next sequence, or replace it with one space / tab character.

When to use:

• You would like a nicely formatted document before starting translation. Multiple spaces between sentences, series of spaces instead of tab characters or line breaks, etc all affect the final look of the translated document.
• You use tools like Wordfast Classic or SDL Trados Word add-in and encounter segmentation problems caused by multiple spaces in poorly formatted documents. For example, a non-breaking space followed by a space after a punctuation mark are not recognized by SDL Trados to be a segment delimiter, so two sentences are often segmented as one; multiple spaces may be used instead of a TAB character, which also causes wrong segmentation).

Options:

1. Find # or more spaces: the minimum number of contiguous spaces to be searched for. If a series of spaces with at least this many spaces is found, it will be selected or replaced. Click Replace or Replace All to replace these sequences with one space.
2. Replace # or more spaces with a special character: [Affects the functionality of Replace or Replace All only]. Select this option and type a minimum number of spaces that you want to replace with any of the following characters: TAB, Line Break, Paragraph Break and Blank (i.e. nothing). If a sequence of spaces of the specified length (or larger) is found, it will be replaced with the specified character. If you don't want to use a special character, uncheck the option or type a very big number (e.g. 100).
   
   This option is useful when the document author used spaces to wrap text to a new line (i.e. you will have to replace spaces with a line break or paragraph break) or format it as a table (i.e. replace these spaces with TAB characters).
3. Outline replacements using 'Marching red ants' style : [Affects the functionality of Replace or Replace All only]. With this setting, you will be able to see all the replacements performed. Also consider turning Track Changes on temporarily if you would like to revert to some old text.

Use Example button to see the current settings in action. A dialogue will be displayed showing sample text before and after replacement.

Click Replace to replace the currently selected space sequence with a space / TAB. Use Replace All to make replacements from the current position to the very end of the document. Click Find Next to search for the next space sequence. To exit the dialogue, click Close.