April 2003

There were 5 posts published in April 2003 (this is page 1 of 1).

What's Your Handle?

When faced with a situation requiring a complex find and replace in Microsoft Word, many people have no idea even where to begin. If you're one of those people, here's the secret: Find the handle.

What do I mean by "handle"? Something your find and replace routine can grab onto to do what it needs to do. For example, a few weeks ago I was faced with a 500-page manuscript that had no style formatting for its different text levels--something I'm sure your authors would *never* give you.

Basically, the text looked like this (but there was a lot more of it, of course):

This Is a Heading

This is some text. And more text. And more. And really several paragraphs more.

JML

This Is a Heading

This is some text. And more text. And more. And really several paragraphs more.

ED

This Is a Heading

This is some text. And more text. And more. And really several paragraphs more.

CBD

So there I am, badly needing styles to be applied and yet not wanting to do it by hand. The first thing I looked for was a handle--some regularly occurring pattern that I could find and then replace with itself but now with a style applied. Since this author, like most authors, was utterly ignorant of the proper way to put line spacing in front of a heading (by modifying "space before" in the heading style), he'd inserted two extra carriage returns in front of every main heading--and nowhere else. There was my handle!

So, after calling up the Replace dialog (Edit > Replace), I typed this into the "Find What" box:

^13^13^13(*)^13

And I typed the Find What Expression code, surrounded by carriage returns, into the "Replace With" box:

^p1^p

Incidentally, you can learn more about all of the wildcards in this article in my paper "Advanced Find and Replace in Microsoft Word," which you can download--free!--here:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

After typing in my find and replace strings, I clicked the More button to display the other Find and Replace options. I clicked the Format button, then "Styles," and then "Heading 1" so the replaced text would be formatted with that style. I put a check in the "Use Wildcards" checkbox. Then I clicked the "Replace All" button.

Ta-da! All of my main headings (and author attributions) were now formatted with the Heading 1 style.

So, how about those author attributions? There sure were a lot of them--each on its own line at the end of each short article. And each one was simply the author's initials--JML, ED, CBD, and the like. There was my handle--two or more capital letters preceded and followed by a carriage return.

In the "Find What" box I typed this:

^13([A-Z]{2,})^13

And in the "Replace With" box I typed this:

^p1^p

Again, I clicked the Format button, then "Styles," and this time "Heading 2" so the replaced text would be formatted with that style. I made sure the check was still in the "Use Wildcards" checkbox. Then I clicked the "Replace All" button, which formatted all of those authors' initials with the Heading 2 style.

The final thing I needed to style was the paragraphs between each occurrence of Heading 1 text and Heading 2 text. There were no obvious handles associated with that text, but it did have those styled headings above and below it. Could I use those for my handles? Yes, but first I'd need to mark them with some arbitrary codes. Why? Because there's no way to find Heading 1 *and* some text *and* Heading 2, all in one pass. So here are the searches (this time with "Use Wildcards" turned *off*) that I used to mark those headings:

Find What:

Heading 1 formatting

Replace With:

^&

Find What:

Heading 2 formatting

Replace With:

^&

That left me with an

code at the end of each Heading 1 (really, at the beginning of the paragraph following it) and an

code at the beginning of each Heading 2. Excellent handles indeed!

My final step was to search for those codes and the text between them, removing the codes and styling the text as Body Text. Piece of cake:

Find What (with "Use Wildcards" turned on):

(*)

Replace With (formatted with the Body Text style):

1

And that did the job. I still had some cleanup to do (like eliminating double carriage returns), but by looking for the handles in the text I was editing, I was able to style a 500-page document in less than five minutes.

The next time you're faced with a similar chore, don't just slog through the document doing everything by hand. Instead, see if there are some handles that will let you automate the whole process. You won't always find them, but you'll find them often enough to make the effort well worth your while. Please note that you should always back up your documents and run your find and replace routines on some test documents before proceeding with the real thing.

If you spend much time doing the kind of thing this article describes, you really should try our RazzmaTag program, which will automate a whole raft of complex find-and-replace operations over a whole raft of documents. You can learn more here:

http://www.editorium.com/razzmatag.htm

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READERS WRITE

Eric Fletcher wrote:

Late last year as part of a message I sent you regarding styles, I mentioned my use of Word 2002's Task Pane. I've been using it a lot and have found it to be an extremely useful tool in more ways than I'd thought. But don't rely on the built-in Help: it is particularly sparse and almost makes it look like the feature was added at the last moment. Here are some of my observations in no particular order.

1. I've made a tool button to be able to pop the Task Pane up whenever I need it. I have two monitors, so I float the task pane (and other toolbars) in the second one most of the time. However, on my wife's single monitor, a button makes it easier to be able to hide and restore the Task Pane (instead of the View | Task Pane menu). You can use a preset button or make your own.

2. The Clipboard panel holds up to 24 elements as you cut or copy. A 25th pushes the first off the stack. You can paste any item by clicking on it, but be aware that a right click lets you delete a clipboard item. This is handy when you need to cut something in a series of copies, or if you inadvertently copy something you don't really need. The feature has the utility of the old "spike" function but lets you manage the contents in a way Spike never did. Excel users should note that the Word and Excel task panes share the same content, so copying between the two is easy. (Very handy for ad hoc copying of addresses from Excel to Word when a mail merge is too much bother!)

3. The Styles and Formatting panel (S&F) has some very useful features for cleaning up document formats. If you've ever examined a Word file in a text editor, you may have noticed how all formatting is collected at the end and each different instance has pointers back into the text where it is to be applied. S&F appears to use this to great advantage: each different instance of any type of formatting can be listed in the S&F panel depending on what you choose to show via dropdown at the bottom of the panel.

The feature is not particularly intuitive, so open a document and try it. Consider a document with a few levels of headings and some manually applied formatting. Bring up the Task Pane and set it to the S&F panel. When you click on a subhead--say Heading 3--in the text, the S&F panel will display the style name at the top. If the selection is a variant of the defined style, the difference(s) will be noted: for example, "Heading 3 + Garamond" when I set a Heading 3 to the Garamond font. But click to the right side of the box and pull down the list to see the options:

Select all XX Instance(s) lets you select all instances within the document but also gives you a *count* of how many there are. (This is very useful if you need to do a count of instances of a particular style: how many bibliographic references are there in this document? Is this the only time I used a Heading 5?)

Clear Formatting removes formatting from the selection.

New Style brings up the dialog to make a new style based on the selection.

Modify Style lets you change the style definition.

Reveal Formatting switches to a different panel to give you all the specific formatting details.

But with the selection still in the modified Heading 3, scroll down and look at the options available for the "Heading 3" style: "Update to match selection" lets you modify the defined style to match the selection in one step. Very useful!

The other different option is Delete. This removes the style definition but doesn't delete the formatted content. In fact, it appears to have the same effect as the "Clear formatting" style selection. Particularly if I am in the process of preparing a template, I like to go through and remove any unnecessary style definitions before finalizing it.

3. When there has been a lot of "fiddling" done to make pages fit, a document can often have numerous variations on style (for example, "Body Text + Condensed by 0.1pt" or "Body Text + Before: 4pt"). If you need to re-use such copy, these variations can create headaches later. Use the S&F panel to browse through and eliminate all such variants. (I use it to remove all extraneous variations to prepare copy for conversion to HTML since I then don't have to deal with manually removing all the code Word prepares for me.)

4. Use the "Show" dropdown in the S&F panel to manage what formatting is displayed. The "Formatting in use" shows only the formatting used within the document (styles and variants of them); "Available formatting" adds the styles defined for the currently-applied template; "Available styles" lists only the styles and without the variants; and "All styles" displays the styles from the current template plus the names of Word's "built-in" styles. This latter option is lengthy, but you can pare it down by choosing "Custom . . ." and selecting which styles you want to have displayed.

Use the Custom pulldown to define what variants should be displayed (font, paragraph, bullet & numbering) and to add the "Clear formatting" option to the style list (which also puts it at the top of the style toolbar pulldown, incidentally). The selection of styles to make visible or not changes by the category selected. Finally, you can save the options in the template so it is set for other or later use.

5. The Reveal Formatting panel (RF) shows all the details about the format of the current selection. If you select "Distinguish source style" at the bottom of the panel, the display shows the underlying style and any differences--showing the detail much as the variants are shown in the S&F panel. The pulldown options for the selection let you clear formatting, choose all other similar formatting in the document, but also change the format to match the surrounding text. I'm not entirely sure what rules are used for this: a word set with French language was set to English but only if I selected the whole word; but a word set in green was changed to black when the selection was within the word.

Select something and then turn on the "Compare with another selection" checkbox. A second box appears, and when you make a second selection, the panel itemizes the differences.

My documents are cleaner and smaller since I've incorporated the Task Pane into my set of Word tools.

Many thanks to Eric for these useful revelations.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Jean Hollis Weber has done it again with her article "Escape from the Grammar Trap," now available on the TECHWR-L site, here:

http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/magazine/writing/grammartrap.html

The article explains why editors too often focus on details and not the bigger picture; how much attention they should pay to formal rules of grammar, punctuation, and usage; and how they can distinguish between essential and nonessential rules. I've worked with many editors and proofreaders who could benefit from Jean's words of wisdom.

Like the article? Be sure to check out Jean's books, newsletter, and other goodies at her Web site, the Technical Editors' Eyrie:

http://www.jeanweber.com/

Wildcard Searching with Tracked Changes

Have you ever put together a clever wildcard Find and Replace routine that you *know* should work, but when you run the routine, you end up with something unexpected? You do it all the time? So do I, but that's not quite what I meant. I'm thinking specifically about routines that use the Find What Text code or the Find What Expression code, which you can learn more about here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703525514

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706365638

Let's say you've got a document that has revision tracking turned on (Tools > Track Changes), and in that document is a numbered list, like this:

1. First

2. Second

3. Third

Let's also say you want to use a wildcard Find and Replace to change the list to this:

(1) First

(2) Second

(3) Third

You should be able to do it like this:

1. Click Edit > Replace to bring up Word's Replace dialog.

2. In the "Find What" box, enter this:

([0-9]@)(. )

3. In the "Replace With" box, enter this (with a space after it):

(1)

4. Put a checkmark in the box labeled "Use wildcards."

5. Click the button labeled "Replace All."

But it won't work. What you'll get is a list that looks like this:

1() First

2() Second

3() Third

How frustrating!

The problem is a bug in Word's wildcard Find and Replace engine. The easy way around the problem is to turn off revision tracking before doing the Find and Replace. So there you go!

If you *need* the changes to be tracked, however, you're in trouble. I know of one possible solution:

1. Keep a backup copy of your original document.

2. Do your Find and Replace with revision tracking turned off.

3. Use Tools > Track Changes > Compare Documents to mark the differences between the changed document and your backup copy.

If you're interested in trying this approach, you might want to know that Compare Documents has been much improved in Word 2002. For example, let's say Document 1 contains a bunch of parenthetical figure references, like this:

(Fig. 8)

Let's also say you want to use a wildcard Find and Replace to put bold tags around each one, like this:

(Fig. 8)

With revision tracking turned on, Word 2000 will give you the following, with the bold codes marked as additions and "(Fig. 8)" marked as a deletion (here represented by consecutive hyphens):

--------(Fig. 8)

Word 2002, however, will give you this, pure and simple, with the bold codes marked as additions and no unnecessary deletion:

(Fig. 8)

No matter what version of Word you're using, now maybe the next time you need to use revision tracking with wildcard searching, you can avoid some of the fuss.

Thanks to Karen L. Bojda and Allene M. Goforth for the examples and the idea for this article.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

I've received so many great tips from readers that I'm simply not able to include everything in this week's newsletter. My apologies to those who are still waiting; in some cases, I'm holding messages to go with a specific article, so they may not show up for several weeks. Thanks for your patience. And please, keep those tips coming!

After reading about the problems of automatic formatting in Word's Document Map over the past couple of weeks, Phil Rabichow (phrab@earthlink.net) sent some pretty useful tips:

I've been experimenting with the Document Map with Word 2000. Here's what I've found, assuming that you have lines that "look like" headings:.

1. If you open a document with headings already in it, Word doesn't add its own. I know that you've found this to be flaky, and I'm wondering if there are some other "rules" that Word follows.

2. If you open a document with Doc Map turned off, nothing happens, of course. If you then turn on Doc Map, Word autoformats the file. You can press Ctrl+Z once to undo the autoformat and make any edits you want without problems. [Note: This is a major discovery on Phil's part.]

3. If you try to replace Level 1 paragraph formatting with Body Text formatting using Find/Replace, it won't work. You can click Replace All, and Word will tell you that it's making changes, but nothing happens. You must include the style definition (e.g., Normal) in the Replace box in order for it to work. And when you do that, it's not necessary to include a paragraph level in the Replace box for it to work. Once you do a Find/Replace, you can click the Doc Map on and off without Word making paragraph level changes.

4. The only problem comes when Doc Map is turned on when you open a document. Since the Level 1 that Doc Map applies is direct formatting, you can select all (Ctrl+A) and press Ctrl+Q to remove all direct paragraph formatting (and leave all character formatting or styles). This will remove all Word's automatic changes, which isn't a problem provided you haven't applied direct *paragraph* formatting yourself to other parts of the document.

Many thanks to Phil for his comments and suggestions.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

OfficeZealot ("where Office zealots come to play . . ." ) is a great-looking site featuring all kinds of information about your favorite word processor and its siblings:

http://officezealot.com/

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 be *different* from those in the previous chapter, not the same. Ideally, there should be a way to set this (or not) as an option:

[] Automatically set headers and footers to "Same as Previous"

As far as I know, this option doesn't exist. If you know otherwise, please let me know, and I'll include your tip in next week's newsletter. In the meantime, here's a macro that will go through a document's headers and footers and unlink them all:

'THE MACRO STARTS HERE
Dim curSection As Section, curHeader As HeaderFooter
For Each curSection In ActiveDocument.Sections
For Each curHeader In curSection.Headers
curHeader.LinkToPrevious = False
Next curHeader
Next curSection
'THE MACRO ENDS HERE

If you don't know how to use macros like that one, you can learn here.

The macro won't set the option permanently, but at least you'll no longer need to unlink all of your headers and footers by hand.

Thanks to Susan Bullowa for suggesting this topic.

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READERS WRITE

I've received so many great tips from readers that I'm simply not able to include everything in this week's newsletter. My apologies to those who are still waiting; in some cases, I'm holding messages to go with a specific article, so they may not show up for several weeks. Thanks for your patience. And please, keep those tips coming!

After reading last week's exchange about automatic formatting in Word's Document Map, Hilary Powers wrote:

After describing the problem of non-heading items showing up in the Document Map, and restoring themselves to it after being removed by a VBA routine, Bill Fosbury wrote:

I will

* run my program to change the outline level to "body text"

* then add the headings that I want

* the next time I open the file the document map builder will be happy

the next time I open the file because I will have some heads and I will

therefore not look for candidates.

To which Jack Lyon writes:

What you've said makes perfect sense. Document Map can't work unless it

has something to work with. So if it doesn't, rather than just sit there

blank (and leave the user wondering why nothing's happening), it

autoformats the document so it *will* have something to work with....

That's certainly the way it looks like it's working, or at least ought to work, but it's not. At any rate, I too have a charming little VBA routine that gets rid of garbage on the Document Map. And when I save the file and reopen it, all the garbage is back. But. Garbage appears unpredictably, whether or not a file has headings defined using Word styles, and as far as I can tell, once a file develops that sort of garbage it never loses it permanently. Meanwhile, if no lines in a file look like headings, the Document Map will show up with nothing in it; it doesn't have to find something and put it up. Nobody's found a fix for this over on the Word-PC list; I've just got the cleaner on a hot key and run it as needed.

I'm not certain if the Document Map ever lets go of stuff it's defined--it may well do so, as many files never develop garbage. But just defining a set of headings is no guarantee that it won't go its own cluttered way....

_____________________

After reading last week's article on automatic dashes, my longtime friend Richard O'Regan wrote:

I disagree with you on the use of the en dash. At least, over here, in "old Europe," the en dash, preceded and followed by a space, is used both in the UK and on the Continent. The em dash no longer sees the light of day.

_____________________

Lindy M wrote:

I share your preference for the em dash rather than the spaced en, but I do use the latter, for one reason: it's easier to control line breaks. With a nonbreaking space before the en dash I can ensure it always breaks at the end of a line rather than at the beginning. I can't find any way to attach an em dash to the end of a word other than spacing it, which would look excessive to my eye. I might add that some people firmly believe that dashes should appear at the beginning of a line, not the end. I don't. I should also confess that I use Word as little as possible. From what I've seen it handles em dash breaks elegantly, but some other word processors and page layout programs need help with this sort of thing, especially older versions.

Thanks to all for their comments and suggestions.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

I've been almost in despair about what to do about spam. Then here comes an email message from my Aussie mate Steve Hudson, who pointed me to Cloudmark's free SpamNet program:

http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/

Unlike other such programs, this one uses the power of distributed computing to identify and block spam. It's not foolproof, but it's sure caught an awful lot of spam for me. Check it out!

Automatic Dashes

Helpful as always, Microsoft Word will automatically insert em dashes for you--but with an interesting twist. I'll tell you what it is in just a minute. But first, here's how to turn on those automatic dashes if you want to use them:

1. Click the Tools menu.

2. Click "AutoCorrect."

3. Click the tab labeled "AutoFormat As You Type."

4. Under "Replace as you type," put a check in the box labeled "Symbol characters (--) with symbols (--)."

5. Click the OK button.

To see how the feature works:

1. Create a new document and type in a word.

2. After you've typed the word, don't hit the spacebar; instead, type two hyphens in a row.

3. Once again, don't hit the spacebar; instead, type another word.

4. *Now* hit the spacebar.

Wow, your two hyphens have turned into an em dash! What, you already knew you could do that? Okay, here's the interesting twist:

1. Create a new document and type in a word.

2. After you've typed the word, *do* hit the spacebar.

3. Type a single hyphen.

4. Hit the spacebar again.

5. Type another word.

6. Hit the spacebar again.

Wow, your single hyphen has turned into an en dash! What's going on here?

In the world of typography, there are several kinds of dashes, each with a different length. As the Chicago Manual of Style (5.105) notes, "There are en dashes, em dashes, and 2- and 3-em dashes. . . . Each kind of dash has its own uses." Chicago specifies that the em dash should be used to indicate "sudden breaks and abrupt changes" and "amplifying, explanatory, and digressive elements."

Some designers, however, beg to differ. Instead of using an em dash, they use an en dash surrounded by spaces. Robert Bringhurst argues for this in his book The Elements of Typographic Style (p. 80):

"The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography. Used as a phrase marker - thus - the en dash is set with a normal word space either side."

In my opinion, Bringhurst is wrong. The whole point of the em dash is to indicate an abrupt change, and a long dash does that better than a short one. That's why Messrs. Garamond, Goudy, and Gill *designed* long dashes for their typefaces, fer cryin' out loud. The shorter en dash surrounded by spaces may look "prettier," but it is also less forceful, and form should follow function. That's my take on it, anyway.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft seems to be trying to accommodate *both* usages. If you type two hyphens in a row, you'll get an em dash. If you type space, hyphen, space, you'll get an en dash with spaces. Chicago or Bringhurst, take your pick. Thanks, Microsoft!

You can learn more about the Chicago Manual of Style here:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/12245.ctl

And you can learn more about The Elements of Typographic Style here:

http://www.typebooks.org/r-elements.htm

Thanks to Steve Hudson for suggesting this topic.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Bill Fosbury wrote:

I saw "Content vs preparation" at:

http://www.planetpublish.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=231

It talks about the Document Map and the Outline Level.

I have the opposite problem. After saving a Lotus WordPro file as a MS Word file, I opened it in Word and saw lots of unwanted stuff in the Document Map. After spend several hours experimenting I discovered the Outline Level and changed it BACK to "Body text". The item disappeared from the Document Map. Since I had so many to change, I figured out how to write some Visual Basic code to change all of them. That worked fine:


Public Sub RemoveFromDocumentMap()
Dim aParagraph  As Paragraph
For Each aParagraph In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
aParagraph.Range.ParagraphFormat.OutlineLevel = wdOutlineLevelBodyText
Next
End Sub

BUT, after saving the file and then reopening it, good old Word changed the Outline Level for all those chunks of text BACK to "Level 1".

A few hours later I came to the realization about what I think is happening and now have a solution. Following this path in Help:

Help

Answer Wizard

search: document map

"Troubleshoot working with the document map"

select: "The Document Map doesn't display some or all of the document's headings."

brings one to this key sentence: "If Word can't find any headings formatted with the heading styles or outline levels, it automatically searches the document for paragraphs that look like headings "

My file does NOT contain any headings (yet).

I read that sentence many times but its significance had not set in.

This is what is happening:

* there are no headings in my document

* when my program changes the outline level to "body text" that removes ALL document map candidates.

* everything disappears for the document map

* when I close and reopen the file, that key sentence comes into play

* since there are NO HEADINGS, it searches for candidates, as that sentence says, and it brings back everything that my program had gotten rid of.

I will

* run my program to change the outline level to "body text"

* then add the headings that I want

* the next time I open the file the document map builder will be happy the next time I open the file because I will have some heads and I will therefore not look for candidates.

After reading Bill's message, I responded:

What you've said makes perfect sense. Document Map can't work unless it has something to work with. So if it doesn't, rather than just sit there blank (and leave the user wondering why nothing's happening), it autoformats the document so it *will* have something to work with. Very typical of Microsoft's general "friendliness" that ends up causing problems rather than solving them. A better approach would have been for Word to say something like "Your document has no headings styles that can be displayed in Document Map. Please apply heading styles and try again." Oh, well.

Thanks to Bill for the useful information.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

The Get It Write tip archive offers this useful advice on using dashes:

http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/091502.htm

But it also offers many other articles for writers and editors:

http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/tips.htm

Want tips delivered free by email? You can sign up here:

http://www.getitwriteonline.com/signup.cfm

Word in Your Pocket

About a year ago, after much back-and-forthing, I finally broke down and bought a Pocket PC--an AudioVox Maestro. Much to my surprise, I loved it, although I was vastly disappointed in the pocket edition of Microsoft Word. Sure, it could open the Word documents I was editing on my desktop computer, but it stripped out such advanced features as footnotes and even styles, dashing my hopes that it could be used for serious editing on the go.

Then, a couple of months ago, I started hearing about a Pocket PC word processor that emulated many of Word's features. Its name was TextMaker, from a company called SoftMaker. I downloaded the trial version, not really expecting it to amount to much. Boy, was I wrong. This program is so impressive I decided I had to tell you about it--not because I have any financial interest in it (I don't) but because it makes an excellent editing system for Microsoft Word documents when you're away from your desktop. (I'm using the program to write this article.)

TextMaker works very much like Word, right down to the red squiggles under misspelled words. Here's a partial list of features:

* paragraph and character styles

* footnotes and endnotes

* find and replace

* multilanguage spell checking

* thesaurus

* indexing

* tables of contents

* headers and footers

* graphics support

* hidden text

* columns

* bookmarks

* symbol characters

* frames

* merge

* tables and sorting

* borders

* automatic hyphenation

TextMaker has all this and more, on a Pocket PC, with the look and feel of Microsoft Word--only smaller! The find and replace feature even includes limited wildcard searching, and it also allows you to search for formatting (including styles) as well as text. Round-tripping between TextMaker and Word on my desktop is flawless except for one thing--TextMaker doesn't do revision tracking (it imports revisions as underline and strikethrough). Ah, well. I guess I can't expect perfection. But TextMaker comes awfully close.

You can learn more about TextMaker here:

http://www.softmaker.de/tmp_en.htm

There are three other programs that really make a Pocket PC worth having. One is Fitaly, which makes entering text a cinch. Use it with the Pocket PC's autocompletion feature and you'll understand how I was able to write this whole article using a stylus. You can learn more about Fitaly here:

http://www.fitaly.com/wince/pocketpcfitaly.htm

Another is Pocket Informant, an information manager. I use it to keep track of publishing schedules and editing tasks, and there's really no similar program that has anywhere near its flexibility and power.

http://www.pocketinformant.com/PocketInformant.php

Finally, there's the free Microsoft Reader that comes with a Pocket PC. When I bought mine, I didn't realize that one benefit would be almost instant, free access to thousands of downloadable books. There are many sources for these, but here are a couple of my favorites:

http://www.blackmask.com/page.php

http://www.bartleby.com/ebook/

Not all books are free, of course, and many nice electronic versions are well worth paying for. Check out the terrific commercial offerings (including my book Total Word Domination) at PocketPCpress:

http://www.pocketpcpress.com/

Note that you can make your own Microsoft Reader books (a nice way to review manuscripts) with a free Microsoft Word add-in that you can download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/reader/downloads/rmr.asp

Have I convinced you yet? If so, you might want to look at the beautiful e750 Pocket PC from Toshiba, which you can learn about here:

http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/toshiba_e750.htm

Don't need that much horsepower (or price)? Maybe you'd like the ViewSonic V35:

http://www.viewsonic.com/products/pocket_pc_pocketpcv35.htm

You can read about and compare lots of Pocket PCs here:

http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/ppc.htm

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RESOURCES

SoftMaker is making a very generous offer to you as a reader of Editorium Update. They're willing to *give* you a complimentary, registered copy of TextMaker for your *desktop* computer (no kidding) so you can see what this wonderful program has to offer. It has all the features of the Pocket PC version, as described above, with a current retail price of $49.95, but you'll get it at no charge and with no strings attached. This is a *great* word processor, powerful and light on its feet, and it's extremely compatible with Microsoft Word. Better get it while you can. You can learn more here:

http://www.softmaker.de/freetm.htm

Want to tell your friends? It's okay to do so, but I'd appreciate the courtesy of letting them know about Editorium Update rather than just sending them the URL above. After all, SoftMaker made their offer specifically to readers of Editorium Update. So why not help your friends become readers? Then they can take advantage of this offer too! Signing up for the newsletter is easy. Just send a blank email message to editorium-subscribe [at symbol] topica.com. Thanks for your consideration and support.