Category Archives: Typesetting

I’ve recently been editing a long, scholarly tome that, for reasons I’ll discuss in a future newsletter, my co-workers and I decided to typeset in Microsoft Word, following the techniques explained here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708956278 Our intrepid typesetter has been fairly content except for one thing: there seems to be no way to keep a word from […]

Ligatures, in case you didn’t know, are letters that have been mashed together as one character. Why would anyone want that? For aesthetic reasons. (Yes, there is an ae ligature for words like “aesthetic.”) The ligatures used most often are fi and fl, accompanied by their friends ff, ffi, and ffl. That’s because these letter […]

Scene 1: You go through your document, fine-tuning its style formatting to the peak of perfection. Then you carefully save your document for posterity. Scene 2: A week later, you open your document. What the . . . ? All of your styles have shifted back to their original formatting. You’ll have to do all […]

Last week’s newsletter explained how to make your own typographical fractions in Microsoft Word. You can read about the technique here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1709983687 But if your document is full of plain-text fractions, like these– 1/3 2/3 5/8 –why not let a macro do the work? I owe my thanks to Wordmeister Steve Hudson for the idea. […]

Using fractions has always been a challenge in Microsoft Word. A few (1/2, 1/4, and 3/4) have been readily available. But what about 1/3, 2/3, and other common ones? Microsoft recommends creating additional fractions by using equation fields or the Equation Editor. You can learn more about these methods here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q137734 Unfortunately, these methods are […]

So, you’ve got a client (or a boss) who wants you to create a *finished* document in Microsoft Word. In other words, you get to do typesetting–in a program that isn’t really designed for typesetting. Here are some tips you might find useful: 1. Consult Word’s Help file or, better yet, a good reference book […]

Microsoft Word includes a number of layout features that you’ll need if you’re doing serious typesetting or desktop publishing. They’re not always easy to get to, however, or to understand. For various reasons, Microsoft has strung them all over the place, under File, View, Insert, Format, and Tools. Good grief! I recommend that you use […]