Author Archives: Jack Lyon

In the past, I’ve recommended using your own template to apply to documents you’re editing. This allows you to use a typeface that’s easy to read on your monitor, offers plenty of differentiation between double and single quotation marks, and has a long em dash, a medium-sized en dash, and a short hyphen (so you […]

One of the problems of editing on-screen is that punctuation marks are harder to see than on paper. Is that speck on my screen a period or just spray from my Diet Coke? (Sorry. Didn’t mean to gross you out.) There’s an easy remedy for this–one I like a lot. Just create a character style […]

If you’ve done much editing in Microsoft Word, you’ve probably used Track Changes (Revisions), which marks deleted and added text so you can review (or let someone else review) your editing. If you haven’t used it, here’s how to turn it on: 1. Click the “Tools” menu. 2. Click “Track Changes.” 3. Click “Highlight Changes.” […]

Last week’s newsletter suggested various ways to change the view in Word as a way to pick up errors missed during a first editing pass. You can read the newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710581825 Unfortunately, I forgot to include one method that is both effective and easy to use–a feature called “Blue background, white text.” Here’s how […]

Lyon’s Law of Typos: On your first glance at a newly typeset document, you will immediately discover an error you missed while editing. Why this maddening experience occurs is a mystery to me, but it’s nevertheless true that when I see a document in a new form, I also spot “new” errors. If this is […]

Sometimes to find or replace a Unicode character in Microsoft Word, you need the character’s number, as explained in the June 12, 2002, issue of Editorium Update: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710421080 If you know the name of the character, you can probably look up its Unicode number at Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources site: http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/search.html But what if you […]

In our last newsletter, I explained how to find and replace Unicode characters, which I’m seeing more and more in electronic manuscripts that come into my hands for editing. The problem is that our shop does typesetting in QuarkXPress, which, at least as of version 5.0, won’t import Unicode characters. (This is also true of […]

I’m seeing more and more documents that use Unicode characters for all kinds of things–fractions, Greek, Hebrew–since these characters are so easy to use in Word 2000 and 2002. You can learn more about Unicode here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1709529895 Sometimes I need to find and replace these characters with something else. How to do so isn’t readily […]

If you’ve started using Microsoft Word 2002, you’ve probably seen the little “balloons” that display your comments and tracked changes. In my opinion, these are pretty much useless in a professional environment. For example, if you get many deletions on a page, Word will abbreviate the balloon messages, so printing these for an author to […]

If you use styles to format text in Microsoft Word (which you should), the style of the currently selected paragraph is displayed in the Style dropdown list on the Formatting toolbar. To see what style is applied to a paragraph, you can click the paragraph and look at the list on the toolbar. Wouldn’t it […]