Visual Keyboard

Do you ever need to change your keyboard layout from one language to another? If so, you've undoubtedly noticed that your English-language keyboard doesn't always match the keyboard layout used by your computer. If this drives you crazy, you'll be happy to know about Microsoft's Visual Keyboard add-in for Word 2000 and 2002. Visual Keyboard displays the keyboard for another language on your screen so you can see the character you're going to get *before* pressing the key. You can learn more about Visual Keyboard (and download the free software) here:

http://tinyurl.com/rzle

And you can see a screen shot at Alan Wood's fabulous Unicode Resources site:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_fonts.html#visual

Once you've installed and activated the software, you can use Visual Keyboard by clicking its letters with your mouse. Or, you can simply use it as a visual reminder while typing on your regular keyboard. Pretty slick!

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READERS WRITE

Brad Hurley (bradhurley@sympatico.ca) wrote:

Although I still do a lot of editing for print publications, most of my work these days involves Web content. I edit documents in Word 2000 and pass them on to my company's Web designers, who primarily use Dreamweaver to make Web pages. I'm looking for ways to facilitate the transition from Word to Web. Saving a Word document as HTML isn't the solution, because Word famously inserts a lot of proprietary garbage into the code, and my clients want clean, standards-based HTML, formatted with external stylesheets instead of font tags.

There are Word-to-HTML tools in Dreamweaver and online (such as Textism's excellent HTML Cleaner: http://www.textism.com/resources/cleanwordhtml/), but if you want to generate text formatting that resembles what you had in your Word document, you have to first replace your custom styles with Word's standard styles. That can be tedious.

I want to be able to copy the text of a Word document and paste it into a Dreamweaver page, while preserving basic text formatting (headings, and any bold or italic body text) and hyperlinks that were created in the Word document. I wish we could bypass Word altogether and create content directly in Dreamweaver, letting my clients review and edit directly with content-editing tools such as Macromedia Contribute. But Contribute doesn't have Word's "track changes" feature, which is crucial to our document review process.

Any advice that you or your readers could provide would be appreciated!

So, gentle reader, do you have any advice for Brad? If so, please send it to me and I'll include it in the next newsletter. Thanks!

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RESOURCES

Aaron Shepard is making available a free article titled "Books, Typography, and Microsoft Word." The article explains how Word can be used to set type of a quality high enough to be used in desktop book publishing:

http://www.aaronshep.com/publishing

Aaron also offers an expanded version of the article in ebook form. One of the most interesting things about the ebook (which I bought) is the impressive quality of its typesetting, done in Word, of course. Check it out!

Thanks to Aaron for his valuable article.

Style Separator

Word 2002 and Word 2003 include a long-awaited feature: the Style Separator. The Style Separator is a special, hidden (and undocumented) paragraph mark. Rather than creating a paragraph *break,* however, it marks the spot where one paragraph style ends and another paragraph style begins--*all in the same paragraph.* That's right--starting with Word 2002, you can use two or more paragraph styles in the same paragraph.

Why should you care? Mainly because it gives you more control over what's included in a table of contents. Let's say you're editing a manuscript whose first chapter begins like this:

"Paris, City of Lights. After an excruciating ten-hour flight, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where my daughter was waiting with a large cardboard sign bearing the inscription 'Dad.'"

Since Word will create the table of contents from the Heading styles you've applied to your chapter headings (Insert > Reference [in Word 2002 and 2003] > Index and Tables > Table of Contents), you try applying the Heading 1 style to the paragraph. But that's no good, because you don't want the entire paragraph to show up in the table of contents. All you want is "Paris, City of Lights."

The workaround for this problem in earlier versions of Word was to break the paragraph in two:

"Paris, City of Lights."

"After an excruciating ten-hour flight, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle International Airport . . ."

Then, after applying the Heading style to the first paragraph, you would select its carriage return (paragraph mark) and format the return as Hidden text (Format > Font > Hidden). You might then have to insert a space to make everything look nice. And when you inserted the table of contents, sure enough, only the first bit would be included. Yes, you can still do that if you don't have Word 2002 or 2003.

If you do have Word 2002 or 2003, however, you can now use Word's built-in Style Separator instead of a hidden paragraph mark. First though, you'll have to drag it up from the storehouse of hidden Word commands and make it available on a menu, toolbar, or keyboard combination. You can learn how to do so here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707444986

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707286867

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1713088939

The name you're looking for on the Commands list is InsertStyleSeparator. Okay, I'll make it easy for you:

1. Click Tools > Customize.

2. Click the Commands tab.

3. In the Categories list, click All Commands.

4. In the Commands list, scroll down to InsertStyleSeparator.

5. Drag InsertStyleSeparator to the Formatting toolbar.

6. Click the Close button.

To actually use the Style Separator, you'll still have to start with the paragraph split in two:

"Paris, City of Lights."

"After an excruciating ten-hour flight from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport . . ."

Then follow this procedure:

1. Place your cursor anywhere in the text of the first paragraph.

2. Create a Style Separator (which will be inserted at the *end* of the current paragraph and not at your cursor position) by using your new toolbar button, menu item, or keyboard combination. The two paragraphs will magically become one, with the Style Separator between the two.

3. Select the text before the Style Separator and style it with the Heading style you want to use in the table of contents.

When you generate your table of contents, the text before the Style Separator will show up there, but not the text after it.

By the way, you can actually see the Style Separator (it looks like a regular paragraph mark with a thin dotted line around it). To do so:

1. Click Tools > Options.

2. Click the View tab and put a checkmark in the All checkbox under Formatting Marks.

3. Click the OK button.

Note that if you open your Style Separator document in an earlier version of Word (97, for example), your Style Separators will become nothing more than hidden paragraph marks. Hmmm. Maybe the Style Separator isn't so revolutionary after all.

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READERS WRITE

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent a terrific tip for creating a printable list of document properties without opening the document:

I accidentally found an article on Microsoft's MVP Site called, "Using VBA, how can I get access to the Document Properties of a Word file without opening the document?" The link is:

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/DSOFile.htm

This document has a link to a MS Knowledge Base article which has the DSOFile download. The article also has a link to a template to download and put in the Word Start Menu. When you do this it puts another option on the Tools menu to run the List File Properties. You then have to select which document properties you want to be listed. Bingo! The result is a table listing the document properties of each document in the folder. Actually, it only lists Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Fortunately for me, most of my documents are Word or Excel.

I have my document properties set up in the footnotes such as file name, subject, comments, author, etc. I wanted to keep an index of all documents so have manually entered the document properties for nearly 3,000 documents into an Excel spreadsheet. But now that I have the DSO file and template, I can run it to list the properties which I list in the spreadsheet and in the same order so that all I have to do is copy the table and paste it in the spreadsheet.

I keep all my new documents in the same folder until I have enough to put on disk. From now on, when I copy them to disk, I will run the properties list, paste it to the index, then either delete the documents or move them to another folder. That way, I will be sure that no document appears on the index more than once. The great thing about the Excel spreadsheet index is that I can sort by subject, or whatever.

This DSO file is going to save lots of time for me!

Many thanks for the great tip!

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RESOURCES

Inquisitor, from Word guru Steve Hudson, detects and reports corruption in Word documents. Here's Steve's description of the new program:

Inquisitor is a tiny tool for MS Word 97+ by the Word Heretic www.wordheretic.com. It uses two different methods to report on the levels of document corruption within the content of your document. Version 1 has no fancy graphics--it is a bare-bones report of the active document--but it is free.

The larger your document, the longer the report takes in a direct linear relationship. On a PIII machine the speeds are quite acceptable in that it is not worth getting up from your desk for reports on documents up to several hundred pages. Extensive advice for getting your code to run as fast can be found in the Word VBA Beginner's Spellbook from www.wordheretic.com.

When strange things start happening in your documents, or your sense of Word paranoia kicks in, click the button on the toolbar and you will have one of two reactions:

Oh, my document is not too corrupt; it must be something else. I'd better ask the Tech Whirlers for help:

http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/

Struth! Let's get started on some cleaning.

The actual cleaning of the document is left up to the user. The www.wordheretic.com site provides numerous goods and services for treating document corruption:

* The Word Spellbook has a manual cleansing procedure.

* The site offers a cleaning service for rapid, thorough cleansing of documents at the standard hourly rate.

* The site will offer an Enterprise edition tool to completely rebuild libraries of documents and templates.

Installation

Extract the template to a Word startup directory; full instructions are in the template if required.

For a limited time, the template is available from the Editorium. You can download it by clicking here:

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

Thanks to Steve for making this program available.

Word to PDF

Ever find yourself needing to convert a Word document into PDF (Portable Document Format)? Adobe Acrobat, the program usually used to create PDF documents, is fairly expensive, so you may be interested in some cheaper or even free alternatives:

The free OpenOffice.org software is made specifically to work with Microsoft Word documents, and it allows you to save documents in PDF:

http://www.openoffice.org

PDF995 allows you to print as a PDF document from inside Microsoft Word. The program works well, but the free version does insist on displaying ads unless you pay the reasonable price to make it stop:

http://www.pdf995.com/

You can use the free Ghostscript program to create PDF files:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

And you'll find an excellent tutorial on how to do so here:

http://tinyurl.com/ma5h

About a month ago, PC Magazine featured an article titled PDFing Cheap that reviewed a dozen alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs:

http://tinyurl.com/ma1v

Need other options? You'll find a bunch of Web sites that will convert Word documents to PDF. Just go to Google.com and search for "convert word to pdf free."

Finally, if you have a Macintosh running OS X, you'll find that the operating system itself includes the ability to create a PDF document through the print dialog box.

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READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article "Quote, Unquote," LeAnne Baird wrote:

I had to smile at the subject of this issue. I have a trick that wasn't my discovery, but I've passed it on to a lot of writers. To get a quotation mark to go the right way, type two of them in a row, then delete the first one. The second one stays as is, going the right direction. This is a slick workaround for people who remain unconvinced of the practicality of shortcut keys.

Derek Halvorson sent this useful information and important warning:

You've suggested in your latest update that Microsoft's use of CTRL+' then ' (or SHIFT+') for closing quotation marks is inconsistent, but it is actually completely consistent with their scheme for accented characters. You can add an accent aigu to any vowel by typing CTRL+' before typing the vowel. So, you only have to remember that, any time you want a superscript accent that is slanted upwards from left to right, you need only key CTRL+' first. If one follows your suggestion and makes CTRL+' the shortcut key for a closing single quotation mark, then one loses the keyboard shortcuts for accented vowels. In this case it seems that there may be some sort of method to the Microsoft madness.

Responding to the article "Style by Microsoft," Linda Gray wrote:

I get rid of those hyperlinked URLs and e-mail addresses by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9 to unlink field codes, although your Editor's ToolKit uses a different key combo, I believe. The publishing company I work for most often, Sage Publications, doesn't want any field codes in the Word files I send to them, so as part of my final check (and usually before that because they're a pain to work around), I press Ctrl+A to select the whole file and then Ctrl+Shift+F9 to unlink the field codes, which turns all those URLs and e-mail addresses into regular type without being linked to anything. It won't take care of any URL or e-mail address that's been underlined, but that's also easily changed by selecting the whole file and pressing Ctrl+U -- unless the file has text that needs to be underlined, which doesn't happen often in the work I do.

Many thanks to all for their comments.

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RESOURCES

Planet PDF is the place to go for all things PDF:

http://www.planetpdf.com