Suggestions for Preflight > Text Patterns

[MikeTO]

Here are a few small additions to Preflight's Text Patterns feature that would be nice to have:

- Multiple words, e.g., "the the", "and and"
- Multiple periods - sometimes I accidentally type two periods at the end of a sentence
- Space before period - sometimes I accidentally type a space before the period at the end of a sentence
- Space before break - I never do this and it's harmless but it's a pet peeve of mine
- Comma without space - when it separates words, not numbers of course, e.g., "...store,and then..."
- Period without space - when it separates words, not numbers of course, .e.g, "...end.The next..."
- [edit - added] Comma preceded by space - this is likely the result of copy/pasting
- [edit - added] Period preceded and followed by space - this is likely the result of copy/pasting

I just ran my book project through MS Word to hunt for grammatical errors and these are the text patterns it caught that Affinity didn't. I don't expect Affinity to have a built-in grammar checker but adding these half dozen patterns would probably save others some grief, too.

Edited November 11, 2023 by MikeTO
added 2 more

[Seneca]

36 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Here are a few small additions to Preflight's Text Patterns feature that would be nice to have:

I thought about similar things in the past regarding Preflight's Text Patterns and I came to a conclusion that being able to add your own GREP patters to the Preflight Panel would solve all these these and other potential issues not listed here.

[MikeTO]

13 minutes ago, Red Sands said:

Two spaces - routinely search and replace a lot of them in all kinds of documents.

Preflight can already find those for you and provide an inline Fix button to correct them.

[MikeTO]

29 minutes ago, Seneca said:

I thought about similar things in the past regarding Preflight's Text Patterns and I came to a conclusion that being able to add your own GREP patters to the Preflight Panel would solve all these these and other potential issues not listed here.

I'd like that but I still think these basic patterns should be added since not everybody is proficient at things like grep.

[MikeTO]

I added two more suggestions to the above list:

- Comma preceded by space - this is likely the result of copy/pasting
- Period preceded by space - this is likely the result of copy/pasting

I just noticed that my Publisher manual has lots of commas preceded by spaces due to the bug with copying extra spaces when copy/pasting a selected word. Now that bug should be fixed but it would still be good to check for this text pattern.

[MikeTO]

And btw I'd turn period preceded by a space off for my Publisher manual since it lists a lot of file formats such as .afpub, while for my history book I'd keep it on because it's rare to need a space before a period.

[walt.farrell]

22 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

And btw I'd turn period preceded by a space off for my Publisher manual since it lists a lot of file formats such as .afpub, while for my history book I'd keep it on because it's rare to need a space before a period.

Perhaps the check should be more specific, for the sequence of a space, a dot, and either a space, other punctuation, or end of line/paragraph.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Perhaps the check should be more specific, for the sequence of a space, a dot, and either a space, other punctuation, or end of line/paragraph.

Good idea, space period space and not just space period.