Category Archives: Editing

Getting a Bird’s-Eye View on Your Document

By Jack Lyon | Published: December 16, 2022

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium Back in the days of editing on paper, I would sometimes spread manuscript pages out on my desk to get a bird’s-eye view of the text I was working on. This could be useful for several reasons: To see if long stretches of text needed to be broken down into […]

Also posted in Computers and Software, Editing Tools, Microsoft Word | Comments closed

Converting Fields to Regular Text (and Why That Matters)

By Jack Lyon | Published: December 9, 2022

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium Microsoft Word documents often include fields that authors use to insert text that isn’t really text: dates, page references, author names, and much more. If you’re editing a document that includes text copied and pasted from a web page (quite frequent these days), the text probably includes hyperlink fields, perhaps […]

Also posted in Editorial Matters, Macros, Microsoft Word | Comments closed

Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word

By Jack Lyon | Published: October 8, 2015

If you’re editing or writing in Microsoft Word, you need to understand Word’s advanced search features. These features are extremely powerful, but they’re also virtually undocumented; most explanations of their use have been limited to a simple table of wildcards. My new book, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, explains in detail how you can use […]

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Better word processing: The Chicago Manual of Style interview

By Jack Lyon | Published: August 18, 2015

The Chicago Manual of Style “Shop Talk” column recently noted: “When it comes to word processing, CMOS users probably represent every level of expertise (or nonexpertise), but regardless of skill level, we all experience frustration at times when we don’t know how to accomplish a task on our computers. Often we do something the way […]

Also posted in Macros, Microsoft Word, Uncategorized | Comments closed

Spelunking in Microsoft Word

By Jack Lyon | Published: November 7, 2014

Laura Poole’s Editorial Bootcamp Before getting into today’s main article (“Spelunking in Microsoft Word”), I want to mention a great resource: master copyeditor Laura Poole’s Editorial Bootcamp, which covers everything from style guides and software to style sheets and spelling. I had the good fortune to sit in on one of Laura’s sessions at this […]

Also posted in Microsoft Word | Comments closed

Removing Spaces at the End of Table Cells

By Jack Lyon | Published: June 5, 2014

Authors do funny things. Sometimes these things are inadvertent; sometimes they’re the result of trying to “prettify” documents for publication. In either case, editors have to clean up what the authors have done. One such problem is spaces at the ends of table cells. A table cell should end with the text it contains. If […]

Also posted in Macros | Comments closed

Deleting Extraneous Carriage Returns in Footnotes and Endnotes

By Jack Lyon | Published: May 22, 2014

During my editing career, I’ve often run into problems with footnotes and endnotes in Microsoft Word. Many authors have no clue about how notes are meant to work, and Microsoft certainly hasn’t made it obvious. In fact, they’ve made it easy to mess notes up beyond repair. One mistake authors make is to insert extraneous […]

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The Law of Least Surprise

By Jack Lyon | Published: October 31, 2013

I wear many hats, but two of my favorites are my editing hat (really just a green-celluloid visor that protects my eyes from the glare of the lightbulb dangling overhead) and my programming hat (a rakish fedora with a feather on the side). I alternate between the two on any given day, but there’s one […]

Also posted in Programs, Proofreading | Comments closed

Editing Documents in LaTeX

By Jack Lyon | Published: October 24, 2013

Do you ever have to edit a document written in LaTeX? There’s recently been some discussion on Copyediting-L about how to do this. I know of three methods. Method 1: Work in raw LaTeX LaTeX looks like this: chapter[On the Origin and Design of Government]{On the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise […]

Also posted in Programs | Comments closed

Deleting Multiple Comments

By Jack Lyon | Published: September 27, 2007

While editing in Word, you may use Word’s Comments feature (Insert > Comment) to insert questions for your client–or possibly your client has used comments to insert questions for you. In either case, there will probably come a time when you need to remove the comments so the file can be used for typesetting. But […]

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