Monthly Archives: October 2002

Vertical Selection

You probably use your mouse to select text in Word all the time, but did you know you can select vertically as well as horizontally? For example, let’s take the following text as an example: Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.” (James Allen, As a Man Thinketh) You can easily […]

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Editors and Preditors

In our shop, we have several editors (who edit books, natch) and a few editorial assistants (who proofread, check corrections, and so on). We edit in Microsoft Word, and most electronic manuscripts require a lot of cleanup. The editors do much of this themselves–turning multiple spaces into single spaces, changing double hyphens into em dashes, […]

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Superscript Ordinals

In many of the manuscripts I edit, the author has used superscript for ordinal numbers, entering 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (and so on) as 1^st^, 2^nd^, 3^rd^, and 4^th^ (the carets represent superscript here). Why? Because Microsoft Word by default inserts ordinal numbers using superscript–one of its many “helpful” features, which I explain how […]

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Raw Codes

@Body:You probably think my email program has gone wacko, inserting codes rather than applying formatting. But it hasn’t. I’m just trying the technique described in this article–marking formatting with raw codes. Why would anyone want to do that? Consider this: @ListFirst:1.Text formatting is misleading. It may look nice, but it comes with a price–the sacrifice […]

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