The space character before formula causes grammatical error in MS word 2013

Question

I have an MS Word mathematical doc. Almost before all of the formulas there exist a grammatical error which when I delete the space and insert another space at the beginning of the formula it disappears.

Since I am a new user I cannot post its image but suppose that $ shows the equation window. Then, when I write "about $NE_j$" it occurs a grammatical error under about while when I use a trick and write "about$ NE_j$" it doesn't.

But I am eager if there is another solution than this trick to escape from this error. because the spaces at the beginning of formulas are sometimes automatically deleted by some version changes.

Answer 1

You can get around some of these problems by inserting a field code that resolves to a space.

For example,

about{ QUOTE 32 }$NE_j$

where the { } is a field brace pair that you can insert using ctrl-F9 on Windows Word.

Or insert

{ SET s " " } 

at the beginning of the document, or in a header/footer, select and update the field, then use

about{ s }$NE_j$

or just

about{s}$NE_j$

You can set up an autocorrect entry to make it easier to insert these fields.

But

• it's a horrible kludge
• it won't fix the type of problem mentioned by Jukka K. Korpela where you have "$A$ is a subset of $B$"

Answer 2

The problem is that in spelling/grammar checks, Word ignores a formula (written using the Equation Tools). So if your write “This is about $...$.” where $...$ indicates a formula, Word will see it as “This is about .” and will complain about the space between the word and the period. As you have observed, moving the space inside the formula helps, although this is illogical and causes trouble if you move formulas around (to a new context). It is still probably the best workaround. The other option is just ignore the messages, but this is error-prone: you might fail to notice some real grammar errors if ignore pointless-looking errors too routinely.

If a formula appears at the start of a sentence, e.g. “$A$ is a subset of $B$.”, such a fix does not help, since the problem is that Word sees the sentence as “ is a subset of ”. It tells you that “is” should be capitalized. What you can do is to reformulate the sentence, e.g. “The set $A$ is a subset of$ B$.”