You'll have better results recording all the search/replace steps you go through in your newer version of Word to create a macro more specific to your needs. Things have probably changed a lot in Word in nine years -- and I think I was even using Word 97. Just noticed mine doesn't address turning three returns into two after getting rid of the spaces before and after returns. (^p^p^p to ^p^p, repeat.) Drat.
Anyway, if you haven't, please give macros a try! Could save you tons of time and greatly streamline the process of making a story epub-ready. And if you find it does simplify the job, please consider sharing the macro.
I've considering making a macro for it (I have Word 2003 so not sure how easy those are to work with there), but the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure that would work. For instance, some stories have a space at the end of each hard line break, others will need it added when the line break is omitted; those would have to be dealt with separately, and you have to look at the story to tell which is which. Also, I've taken to adding my placeholder symbols at the beginning of the last three lines of the heading info just to save on the hassle of splitting the line later when my Replace Alls remove the line breaks, lol. It's actually quicker to add them beforehand than to go hunt down where to hit Enter later. Some stories have three ^p, others don't. And there's still the skimming through to make sure all formatting worked great--I've found some extra carriage returns at scene breaks here and there (and some scene breaks missing at least one carriage return, causing some bunching up). I do that as I break it up into sections, so it's not really extra work, but does require some monitoring.
So although I'm sure someone macro-savvy could work past those, I've got it down pretty fast so it's not too much of a pain. Three authors done and counting now . . . the only slowdown will be adding them to the wiki. *g*
Thanks for doing the work to get it set up for us to upload, Lauren! I'm glad to be able to share what I've gotten done with the rest of the FoLCs.
Couldn't have imagined this could happen, the first time I started reading L&C fic!
