Monthly Archives: January 2002

In the beginning was ASCII, and ASCII was limited–128 characters wasn’t enough. So Microsoft extended it to 256–still not enough. True, you could now access “foreign-language” and other special characters by using “code pages” with different fonts in Microsoft Word. If you’ve clicked Insert > Symbol and then changed the font on the drop-down list […]

Microsoft Word comes with four kinds of spaces: * word spaces * nonbreaking spaces * em spaces * en spaces The word space is just the ordinary space used between words–the kind you insert with the spacebar. Its main strength is its variable size, which is especially important with justified type. Microsoft Word ordinarily expands […]

[Last week’s newsletter featured an article on British and American spelling. Thank goodness a reader who actually knows about such things sent some corrections. Please see the Readers Write column (below the main article) for details. I’ll postpone my article on British to American translation (bonnet/hood) until I’ve verified my list with more than just […]

Have you ever needed to change spelling from British English to American English or vice versa? One way to do this is to change the language format of your Word document and then do a spell check. For example, if you needed to change spelling from British to American, you could change the language format […]

Part of my editing process is applying paragraph styles (like Heading 1) to a manuscript. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed an annoying bug: Applying the paragraph style often makes character formatting (such as italics) disappear. You can see this for yourself: 1. Create a new document in Word 6, 95, 97, 98, 2000, or […]