I’m still cleaning up that file – lots of details to look out for:

1. Remove tabs. Search for ^t, and replace with nothing.
   1. I thought all the tabs were gone, but they still lurked in blank lines, at the ends of paragraphs, and in one story that I’d failed to remove them from.
2. Remove spurious blank lines. Search for ^p^p and make sure they all look right – well, rightish is enough at this point.
3. Remove spaces at the ends of lines. Search for space^p and replace with ^p.
   1. Spaces (and tabs) at the ends of paragraphs can really mess up the automatic spacing. They’re pretty yuk in poetry too.
4. Check hyphens and hyphen types:
   1. Search for  space-space and replace with — except in a poem.
   2. Search for space–space and replace as above.
   3. Search for — and replace carefully with the above.
      1. Some people use one, two or three hyphens, with or without outlying spaces, but we’re standardizing on m-dashes).
      2. Some people use dashes instead of ellipses or semicolons so I need to be careful how I replace them. We’re trying to standardize ellipses too; see next item.
      3. Search for n-dashes, with or without spaces, m-dashes with spaces, and anything else you can think of….
   4. I should probably figure out how to use Word’s replace to do this faster:
      1. Replace brings up a box with space for you to type what you’re searching for and what you’re replacing.
      2. Click on “more.”
      3. Click on “special.”
      4. Select what you want to replace and see what the code looks like – a great way to find those ^ts when you’ve forgotten them.
5. Check ellipses and ellipsis types:
   1. I’ve no idea why there are different types, but we’ll standardize on three dots, no spaces, and a fourth dot for a period. This is what one of my publishers does. It makes formatting for print slightly harder, but using anything else makes it even worse when you try to format ebooks.
   2. I’ve no idea how to find all the different types until I run into them (so I can cut and paste into a search box). I’ve looked for three dots, fixed them, and fixed the Word-style ellipsis so far.
6. Check for blue underlines:
   1. I checked more carefully this time. Word is really good at suggesting when something might be wrong.
   2. It spots missing words quite often too!
   3. Fix the ones that are clearly wrong. Leave the ones that would require more careful reading.
7. Check for red underlines:
   1. Names – leave them as they are
   2. dialect – leave it as it is
   3. typos – fix them.

At this point I realize some headings have X, by Y; others just X by Y. Some have every word capitalized; some just important words; and some are entirely in capitals.

I’ve decided titles should be capitalized, by author not, and no commas, giving, say

THE CURE by Sheila Deeth

so now I go through all the headings, conveniently displayed in the navigation pane, and fix them. Then I break for lunch!