Thread: Typos in ebooks
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Old 05-23-2010, 03:05 PM   #108
JSWolf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael J Hunt View Post
Susan,
I discovered, through trial and error, that strange changes to the middles, beginnings and endings of certain words follow after you use the 'Find' and 'Change to' button (or equivalent) in your programme. Particularly if the word you change and replace is a short one. A good for instance is if you change the name of a character from, say 'Tom' to 'Fred', any references to tomatos will appear as 'Fredatos', or, if you're writing a jungle story, 'tom-tom' to 'fred-fred', or sci-fi, 'atom' to 'afred', or a medical, from 'anatomical' to 'anafredical'. This can be both irritating and funny.

When I first saw it, it took me some time to realise what was happening, then it dawned; now I'm very cautious when I use the facility.

MJ
In your example of Tom to Fred. There is a way around it. Use a case specific search for Tom (not the capitol T) and also search for a space around the word. That will catch most instanced of Tom and correctly replace them with Fred. Then just do a search/ manual replace for Tom (case specific again) without any spaces. That will get them all without making other words that use tom or Tom.

Also, there is regex that would get it right in a search/replace.
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