Author Archives: Jack Lyon

Last week I discussed the evils of directly applied formatting but didn’t explain how to get rid of it. I know what you’re going to say: “Just press CTRL + A to select all and then press CTRL + SPACE.” That will remove it, all right. The problem is, it will also remove italics, bold, […]

If you use Microsoft Word, I guarantee you’ve been frustrated by its formatting, especially if you edit someone else’s documents. For example, you modify the Heading 1 style to use Palatino rather than Arial–but Arial it remains. What’s going on here? Consider my living room wall, which I daringly painted red. Then, coming to my […]

Do you ever work with lists of personal names–authors, meeting lists, and so on? If so, you could probably use NameSwapper, our new add-in program that swaps last names and first names (or vice versa, if that makes sense) in a list of names. For example, if you’ve got a list of names like this– […]

Last week I introduced a program that creates typographic spaces by changing a space’s point size relative to the surrounding text. But why is that a good idea? If you save a document with such spaces in almost any other kind of format–HTML, XML, or even ASCII–those spaces are going to cause problems. For example, […]

Two weeks ago, I explained how to “roll your own” typographical spaces (thin spaces, hair spaces, and so on) in Microsoft Word. Last week I explained how to use typographical spaces with Unicode. But if you don’t want to make typographical spaces by hand and your version of Word doesn’t support Unicode, you might want […]

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 […]