Guess what I’m doing?

When you get your manuscript ready for press, you need to remove any crazy little characters that somehow got into it – so they don’t f*ck up your eBook formatting, causing, I don’t know, extra pages in the middle of a sentence or something.

The paperback review is even more fun.

The mysterious characters that you know you didn’t put in are hard to find, though, so you have to look  carefully.

And look carefully again…

and hope your beta readers find the ones you and your editor miss…

and look carefully again…

Meanwhile, if ONLY there was a list of stuff to look for using the find/replace feature in Word!

Well, since you asked, I found one and took it right from the pages of How To Geek’s website. You’re welcome.

Search String /  Searches For

^l (lowercase L)          Manual line break

^p        Paragraph break

^n        Column break

^m       Manual page break

^b        Section break

^t         Tab character – that sucker is EVIL, I tell ya! HOW does that get in there???

^w       White space (space or tab)

^s         Nonbreaking space

^~        Nonbreaking hyphen

^-         Optional hyphen

^=        En dash (–)

^+        Em dash (—)

^^        Caret (^)

^%       Section symbol (§)

^v        Paragraph symbol (¶)

^?        Any character

^$        Any letter

^#        Any digit

^e        Endnote mark

^g        Graphic