Category Archives: Typesetting

Resetting Shakespeare

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium In late 2020, I discovered the down-to-the-character transcription of Shakespeare’s First Folio created by PlayShakespeare.com. I knew immediately what I had to do: Reset the type in a new edition of the book—something that’s never been done since the 1600s. With the encouragement and advice of Ron Severdia, founder and […]

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Inserting Unlinked Sections

Microsoft Word, in a broad sense, has two kinds of section breaks (Insert > Break): 1. The kind that starts a new page (which includes “Next page,” “Even page,” and “Odd page). 2. The kind that doesn’t (which includes “Continuous”). The second kind is used for such things as inserting two-column text in the middle […]

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Section Breaks

In this final installment of how to set up book pages for publishing, we look at section breaks in Microsoft Word. Section breaks let you do a number of things. The most important ones for our purposes are: * Restart page numbers from section to section–between front matter and chapters, for example. * Restart footnote […]

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Setting Up Headers and Footers

After you’ve set up the pages of your book (as explained in the last newsletter), you’ll need to set up headers and footers. Using Microsoft Word, you might think you’d find headers and footers under the Insert menu. Not so; they’re under View. Why? Because your document *already* includes headers and footers. Every Word document […]

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Setting Up Book Pages

Two weeks ago, I explained how to calculate page margins when typesetting a book in Microsoft Word. I neglected, however, to explain how to set up the pages themselves. So here goes. For most books, you’ll need three different page layouts: 1. The first page of a chapter. 2. A left (verso) page. 3. A […]

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Calculating Page Margins

In past newsletters, I’ve sometimes discussed aspects of typesetting in Microsoft Word: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708754845 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708956278 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711888513 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711932079 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1712050217 One item I haven’t addressed is how to calculate page margins *for publication,* which is not the same as just clicking File > Page Setup and putting in some numbers. If you needed to set up page margins […]

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Microsoft's Font Properties Extension

If you work a lot with fonts, you’ll probably be interested in Microsoft’s Font Properties Extension, which will run under Windows 95 or higher (sorry, Mac users). The extension makes it possible to display information about a font’s origin, copyright, and licensing; its hinting and smoothing; whether or not the font can be embedded in […]

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Unlinking Headers and Footers

If you work much with headers and footers in Microsoft Word, you’ve probably noticed that when you insert a section break, it’s automatically set to “Same as Previous.” For many Word users, especially in the publishing world, this is an annoyance. If I’m creating a new chapter in a book, I want my headers to […]

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Hyphenation Exception Dictionary

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been working on a long, complex book that had to be typeset in Microsoft Word. I learned a lot from the experience, and I’ll be passing on some of that hard-won knowledge in future issues. As I worked on the book, one problem quickly became apparent: Microsoft […]

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Break That Word Here!

Last week’s newsletter explained how to use a zero-width nonbreaking space to keep a word from breaking at the end of a line when hyphenation is turned on (Tools > Language > Hyphenation > Automatically hyphenate document). Fine as far as it goes. But what can you do to break a word at a place […]

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