How do I search for a period?

[MarioM]

My document contains many instances of periods without spaces after them. I'm trying to search for these to correct them, but I am having no luck. Publisher does not seem to be able to find a period. When I type a . into the search box, Publisher returns every single character in the entire document. How do I get it to find a period?

Addendum to this question: I believe I figured out how to search for a period. I needed to select "normal" in the settings menu.

Now I have a new problem. Many of my periods have abnormally short spaces after them, much shorter than the spaces between words in the same lines. How do I fix this?

[Pšenda]

14 hours ago, MarioM said:

Many of my periods have abnormally short spaces after them, much shorter than the spaces between words in the same lines. How do I fix this?

Screenshot? (with menu Text/Show Special Characters)
Replace?
Example file?

Edited May 3, 2022 by Pšenda

[carl123]

6 hours ago, MarioM said:

Now I have a new problem. Many of my periods have abnormally short spaces after them, much shorter than the spaces between words in the same lines. How do I fix this?

Depends on how those short spaces were created

e.g. Are they smaller as they use a different font size?

A sample piece of some affected text showing the problem and uploaded to the forum may help eliminate a lot of guesses

[walt.farrell]

Yes, it would help to have a short sample .afpub document that we can examine.

By the way, rather than doing a "normal" search, you could stay with a "regular expression" search but use \. as the search string.

[thomaso]

34 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

stay with a "regular expression" search but use \. as the search string.

Couldn't you add the mentioned but unknown spaces to the GREP search?

Unfortunately I didn't find the correct syntax for Affinity ( \S doesn't work). Here I simply copied the various spaces behind \.   , they don't show up in the Find field but seem to be found:

I tried to replace them with \.\s but it resulted in  .s  not in  .  (period + space) as I expected with my slim skills. 😬

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Couldn't you add the mentioned but unknown spaces to the GREP search?

Until we have a sample document we don't know what is there. Maybe there are only justification artifacts, for example, and not spaces of different sizes. So I chose not to suggest something like that.

[MarioM]

Here is a sample page of my document showing instances where the space after a period is much smaller than the spaces between words in the same line. Note "world. A" in the first line, and "end. Westerns" in the 4th line. 

Thanks for looking at this.

sample page MarioM.afpub

[thomaso]

30 minutes ago, MarioM said:

Here is a sample page of my document showing instances where the space after a period is much smaller than the spaces between words in the same line.

There is nothing to replace or retype but simply to restyle: The various spots have the kerning reduced before & after the space following a period. Since its before captials A and W I guess it initially was done because of a specific font. Thus just reformatting does fix it, for instance you can create a style + apply it to all frames / all text.

Just a note: this .afpup is set to 16 bit, not sure if in purpose.

9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

So I chose not to suggest something like that.

You were right! ... which on the other hand is a pity because I hoped you would post the syntax for non-whitespaces and how to replace them. I just became curious when I couldn't find it myself.

[walt.farrell]

26 minutes ago, MarioM said:

Here is a sample page of my document showing instances where the space after a period is much smaller than the spaces between words in the same line. Note "world. A" in the first line, and "end. Westerns" in the 4th line. 

Thanks for the document.

Those are normal spaces. You can see that in either of two simple ways:

1. Enable Text > Show Special Characters from the Menu.
   or
2. Put the cursor immediately after the space, and type Alt+U (or use Text > Toggle Unicode)

Possibly you're being confused by the kerning and the wide/sloped letter shapes. (Edit: Oops; forgot to check the Kerning settings. Thanks, @thomaso.)

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

which on the other hand is a pity because I hoped you would post the syntax for non-whitespaces and how to replace them.

I was going to check on that, but forgot. Thanks for the nudge

[kenmcd]

Those odd kerning settings are in the font.
For example this is what is causing the issues with the space+A spacing:
<pair l="space" r="A" v="-205"/>

space+T = -256
space+W = -256
etc.

The () around the kerning number shows it is a default from the font.
If you manually change it, the parenthesis go away.

Change the font and those spacing/kerning issues go away.

[MarioM]

Thanks everyone for your help. I appreciate you all giving your time and thought on this. I learned a few things about kerning and fonts. I have decided to take LibreTraining's advice and just change the font.

Mario

 

 

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

which on the other hand is a pity because I hoped you would post the syntax for non-whitespaces and how to replace them. I just became curious when I couldn't find it myself.

In my testing, \s finds whitespace (any of the space characters except zero-width for example), and \S finds non-whitespace, just as I would expect.