You probably use your mouse to select text in Word all the time, but did you know you can select vertically as well as horizontally? For example, let's take the following text as an example:

Circumstance does not make the man;

it reveals him to himself."

(James Allen, As a Man Thinketh)

You can easily select just the first few words of each line down through the whole quotation, something like this:

Circumstance does

it reveals him to

(James Allen, As

To do so, just hold down the ALT key (PC) or OPTION key (Macintosh) as you select your text with the mouse. After you've made your selection, you can cut, copy, format, and so on.

Please note that if you're going to cut or copy and then *paste* the text somewhere else in your document, you must make enough room for the multiple lines to fit. They won't just go in at the insertion point the way regular text does. If you don't make enough room (by inserting carriage returns), the text will get mixed up with existing lines of text. This is difficult to explain, but if you try it you'll see what I mean.

Selecting text vertically is especially handy if you need to copy or format the first part of a list. I hope you find it useful.

____________________________________________________

DVORAK KEYBOARD UPDATE

Last week's newsletter discussed the Dvorak keyboard (a more efficient layout than the traditional QWERTY keyboard). I've been practicing about half an hour a day for a week now and thought some readers might be interested in my experience. Here's what I've learned so far:

1. Practicing on my own the first couple of days produced uneven results, so I decided I needed a more structured approach. Since then I've been practicing with the MasterMind Typing Tutor, available at no charge from DvortyBoards (check out their keyboards!):

http://www.dvortyboards.com/index.html

A program with more thorough instruction and fancier features is TypingMaster, which you can try and buy here:

http://www.typingmaster.com/

2. At first I had to consciously think about what finger to use on each key, with a fingering chart to help me. After about three days, though, my fingers *mostly* knew where to go on their own, although sometimes I'd have to think about it. At the end of the week, this is still true.

3. I've had trouble learning particular keys, especially I, D, X, and B, all of which require stretching the index fingers outside the home position.

4. I now have considerable accuracy on the Dvorak keyboard if I type *slowly* (about 15 words a minute). As soon as I try to speed up, my fingers revert to their 35 years of QWERTY training.

5. Typing whole words is much more difficult than typing individual letters, because my brain is accustomed to instantly converting words into keystrokes in QWERTY. I'm still on the letter-by-letter level with Dvorak.

6. The Dvorak keyboard is exceedingly easy on the fingers since it doesn't require the constant stretching and moving needed with QWERTY.

Next week, I'll give you a final report with some recommendations about learning the Dvorak keyboard.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

David Stacey wrote, "The general public react to the use of different colors when marking their documents. Do you have any recommendations about the choice of colors? (Too much red seems to cause them stress.) I'm now using red for strikethrough and blue for insertions."

I think this is a good question, and I like the idea of using blue for insertions. How about using 25% gray for strikethrough? (You have to scroll down in the list of colors to see this one.) That would help communicate the idea that the text has been deleted because it would be lighter than the surrounding text.

Here's an exchange between subscriber Miriam Bloom and me:

MIRIAM: When comparing (merging) documents in MS Word for Windows XP, is there a way to format different font colors for the "delete" vs. the "add" function? I used to be able to do it in older versions of both Word and WordPerfect, but now I can't figure out how to do it in either.

JACK: As far as I can tell, Microsoft has removed this feature from Word 2002, which makes me very grumpy indeed. In fact, I'm unhappy with nearly all of their "enhancements" having to do with merged documents and tracked changes. If you like, you can read my rant on the subject here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710381892

MIRIAM: Moreover, I can't figure out how to do it after the fact because find-and-replace doesn't seem to work on merged documents.

JACK: That's because "red underlined" (for example) for revision tracking is a different kind of formatting. If you simply format some text as red underlined using the Font dialog, you should be able to find and replace it, even in a merged document.

MIRIAM: Is there an alternative way of searching it--or any way at all of getting around the color problem short of going through documents and redlining them manually?

JACK: You can use Word's Reviewing toolbar to go to each new change, but this won't alter appearance. You could go back to Word 2000, which allows you to use separate colors for insertions and deletions. That's what I've done. 🙂

Thanks to David and Miriam for their questions.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Many editors have used the popular CompareRite program to identify and display document revisions. Unfortunately, CompareRite has been "retired" by LexisNexis. You can read about this here:

http://www.lexisnexis.com/custserv/compare.asp

Fortunately, alternatives are available. You can learn more here:

http://www.dqsnet.com/documentcontrol.html

http://www.prestosoft.com/examdiff/examdiff.htm

In our shop, we have several editors (who edit books, natch) and a few editorial assistants (who proofread, check corrections, and so on). We edit in Microsoft Word, and most electronic manuscripts require a lot of cleanup. The editors do much of this themselves--turning multiple spaces into single spaces, changing double hyphens into em dashes, and so on. But I keep thinking that many such tasks could be relegated to someone less expensive than a full-fledged editor--sort of a "pre-editor," or, just for fun, "preditor."

The preditor's job would be to get electronic manuscripts ready for the editors, who could then focus more fully on editing. The preditor could do such things as:

1. Convert files (WordPerfect to Word) as needed. I recommend using a dedicated file-conversion program, such as MacLinkPlus or Conversions Plus:

http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/

http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/index.html

2. Combine chapter files into one book file or split a book file into chapters, depending on how your editors like to work. Editor's ToolKit can automate this for you:

http://www.editorium.com/14842.htm

3. Rename files to fit your house standard, such as job number_chapter number (3298_0001.doc). If you don't have such a standard, you should create one. It will help streamline the publishing process and simplify archiving.

4. Apply to the files a document template formatted especially for editing:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700934923

5. Apply styles (or codes) to specify document structure and typesetting levels:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705536230

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711132842

6. Fix messed-up notes:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710307842

7. Find and replace common editorial and typographical problems. FileCleaner can automate much of this:

http://www.editorium.com/14845.htm

8. Use wildcard and other searches to fix inconsistencies in editorial style, consulting with the project editor as needed. MegaReplacer makes this a snap and even includes scripts to fix common editorial problems:

http://www.editorium.com/14843.htm

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705963026

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706069286

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706167662

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706267069

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

9. Run a spell check; it won't catch misused words, but it will catch the most elusive of typos:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700310413

At this point, those files should be squeaky clean--except for the actual editing, which editors can now do without worrying about such picayune problems as whether or not commas are inside or outside of quotation marks. Yes, I know that editors can't ignore such things, but a preditor can help free up editors' time so they can focus mainly on clarity, meaning, and communication.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Last week I explained how to overstrike characters by condensing character spacing. Karen L. Bojda sent an alternative method:

To overstrike two or more characters (say, the / and e of your example), you can also use an "equation" field with the overstrike switch, O:

{EQ O(/,e)}

which can be inserted with the Insert > Fields... command (at least in my old Word 98 for the Mac). The overstrike field does have the advantage that its formatting can't be accidentally removed, but the overstruck (overstricken?) characters produced this way are more or less centered. Your condensed-text method allows finer control over the extent of overlap. Plus your method allows overstriking a backslash, which mucks up a field.

Karen L. Bojda

Bojda Editorial & Writing Services

kbojda [at symbol] insightbb.com

http://www.bojda.com

Yehuda Yoel Zimmerman also suggested using this method.

Thanks to Karen and Yehuda for the helpful tip.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Last week, I mentioned the Microsoft Word Legal User's Guide for Word 97 and 2000, but there's also a version for Word 2002! Donna Payne wrote:

On the Legal User Guide, the link for Office XP/Word 2002 is:

http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2002/wdLegalG.aspx

Our company was a member of the Microsoft Legal Advisory Council and authored both the Word 97/2000 and Word 2002 versions of the Legal User guide for Microsoft. Your readers may want to take a look at our books, Word 97 for Law Firms, Word 2000 for Law Firms, and Word 2002 for Law Firms for more detailed information.

Sincerely,

Donna Payne

President

Payne Consulting Group, Inc.

www.payneconsulting.com

Thanks to Donna for this valuable information.

In many of the manuscripts I edit, the author has used superscript for ordinal numbers, entering 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (and so on) as 1^st^, 2^nd^, 3^rd^, and 4^th^ (the carets represent superscript here). Why? Because Microsoft Word by default inserts ordinal numbers using superscript--one of its many "helpful" features, which I explain how to turn off here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700237543

But if the superscript ordinals are already in the manuscript, you can't just turn them off. You have to figure out another way to get rid of that superscript. One way is to find and replace it (Edit > Replace) with "not superscript" (as Word phrases it). That will work fine unless the manuscript has superscript formatting you want to keep, in which case you have to find and replace each superscript item individually. Even that isn't so bad--unless the manuscript has footnotes or endnotes, in which case you might have to check hundreds of superscript reference numbers during your search. Ugh.

Faced with that very problem in the past few weeks, I figured out a simple way around it:

1. Make a backup copy of your document (always, always, always).

2. Click "Edit > Replace" to display the Replace dialog.

3. In the "Find What" box, enter the following wildcard string:

[!^02]

4. Format the "Find What" box as Superscript. The easy way to do this is to press CTRL + SHIFT + = (on a Macintosh, click the "Format" button, then "Font," and put a check in the "Superscript" checkbox; you may first need to click the "More" button).

5. Format the "Replace With" box as Not Superscript/Subscript. The easy way to do this is to press CTRL + SHIFT + = two times in a row (on a Macintosh, click the "Format" button, then "Font," and clear the "Superscript" checkbox).

6. Put a check in the "Use Wildcards" checkbox. (You may need to click the "More" button to make the checkbox available.)

7. Click "Replace All" (or "Find Next" and "Replace" if you want to try a few manually).

That will get rid of all superscript *except* on note reference numbers. The secret, of course, is that [!^02] code, which tells Word not to include note reference numbers in its search. You can learn more about searching with codes and wildcards here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1704081834 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705963026

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706069286

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706167662

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706267069

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

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Code Clarification

Amanda Lucas wrote to ask about using raw codes in Microsoft Word (as discussed in last week's newsletter) as opposed to the Reveal Codes feature in WordPerfect. Thinking that others might also be wondering about this, I offer the following clarification:

Working with raw codes in Word is a completely different thing than working with Reveal Codes in WordPerfect. You might think of them as equivalents, as in this diagram:

Codes in Microsoft Word <---> WordPerfect Reveal Codes

But they're not. A better way to think about using codes in Microsoft Word is like this:

Coding systems (XML, XPressTags, TeX tags, Ventura tags, etc.)

|
|

v
Rendering systems (Web browsers, QuarkXPress, TeX, Ventura, etc.)

Quite a few publishers, especially in academic and technical settings, work directly with codes (using basic text editors such as emacs) and then render their files into presentation documents (typeset docs, PDFs, etc.) using a separate program. I was trying to explain that Microsoft Word, too, could be used in that way. WordPerfect's Reveal Codes feature merely shows the coding underneath the program's WYSIWYG text. Working with raw codes, on the other hand, is a way to get specific about document levels and structure. It's not a substitute for Reveal Codes, which Word doesn't need if used correctly (in other words, if formatting is done with styles rather than applied directly to text).

Overstriking Characters

David M Varner wrote:

"In the course of organizing some recent revisions, some text in one of the documents required a strikethrough. It occurred to me that strikethroughs other than a horizontal line would be handy, slashes perhaps, depending on the situation. My question is this: Is there a way in MS Word to overstrike any character with any other character? This is one thing you can do using a typewriter that you can't, as far as I know, do on a computer."

There is a way to overstrike characters. You can condense the spacing between the characters to the point that the characters overlap. Here's how:

1. Type the two characters, such as "/e".

2. Select the two characters.

3. Click "Format > Font."

4. Click the "Character Spacing" tab.

5. In the "Spacing" list, select "Condensed."

6. In the "By" list, click the arrows until you've got the characters the way you want them. You can see a preview at the bottom of the dialog box.

7. Click the "OK" button.

Thanks to Amanda and David for their questions.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

The Microsoft Word Legal User's Guide contains "step-by-step instructions to help legal users accomplish the tasks necessary to build robust legal documents in Microsoft Word 97 or Microsoft Word 2000," but much of the information here will be useful for other Word users as well:

http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/

@Body:You probably think my email program has gone wacko, inserting codes rather than applying formatting. But it hasn't. I'm just trying the technique described in this article--marking formatting with raw codes. Why would anyone want to do that? Consider this:

@ListFirst:1.Text formatting is misleading. It may look nice, but it comes with a price--the sacrifice of structure and control to appearance. Is your heading formatted with Heading 2 paragraph style, or is it formatted directly as Arial 14-point bold? The difference may not be immediately apparent. With codes, you know.

@ListMiddle:2.Using codes forces you to resist the "easy fix" of directly applied formatting. Come on, admit it: You sometimes center a heading with CTRL + e rather than modifying the paragraph style as you should. I know I do. But if I use raw codes, I don't even have to think about it. I just enter "@Heading 3:" and start typing away. My guilty feelings are gone (sob!).

3.Using codes is just plain easier than mucking about with styles and fonts and formats all the time. It's a simpler way to live. Try it! You might be surprised at how much you like it. If you're really going to make the attempt, you might want to record macros that insert your most common codes and then assign those macros to toolbar buttons or keyboard combinations.

4.Using codes for special characters means there's no more worrying about conversion problems from platform to platform.

5.Using codes ensures greater consistency from document to document--at least it does if you keep using the same codes. Ensuring consistency of styles is more difficult. Which ones are yours? Which ones did Word sneak in when you weren't looking? BodyTextUgly? Where did that come from?

6.Using codes makes it easy to tag your text by function and structure rather than by appearance. For example, instead of using a Heading 1 style, you can tag your text as @ChapterHead:, which actually says what your text is being used for.

7.Using codes means you can work in a simple text processor when you don't have access to Microsoft Word.

8.Using codes makes your formatting human readable! That's pretty remarkable, when you consider all of the hidden, proprietary formatting systems in the world.

@ListLast:9.Using codes makes it easy to translate your formatting into a variety of other formats: HTML. XML. Even Microsoft Word.

@Body:"And how," you ask, "can I turn codes into Microsoft Word formatting?" With our RazzmaTag program, which you can learn more about here:

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

One of the most popular academic typesetting programs, TeX, is built around the concept of working directly with codes and then applying formatting based on those codes. Other programs, too, can import coded documents, including QuarkXPress, PageMaker, and FrameMaker, and many publishers take advantage of that fact, asking their editors to work directly with codes. If you've never considered this possibility, now you can add it to your bag of tricks.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Allin Cottrell provides an excellent and informative rant on the whole subject of separating content from presentation. You'll find it here:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

A good place to learn more about TeX (which, by the way, is *free*) is the TeX User Group Home Page:

http://www.tug.org/

Yes, it is possible to "reveal codes" in Microsoft Word. Interested? Check out CrossEyes, from Levit & James:

http://www.levitjames.com/crosseyes/crosseyes3.htm?lid=google

This week I've been editing notes--4,028 of them to be exact. And boy, were they a mess--a garbled collection of inconsistency and error. They looked something like this:

Jones, Sunlit Land, 24.

Era of Sand, Jan. 1953, 59.

Today's News, April 17, 1965, 3.

Jones, Sunlit land, 33.

Era of Sandy, January 1953 20.

Jones, Sunlit Land, 78.

As I worked through them, I kept wishing I had a way to sort them alphabetically, so they'd look like this:

Era of Sand, Jan. 1953, 59.

Era of Sandy, January 1953 20.

Jones, Sunlit Land, 24.

Jones, Sunlit land, 33.

Jones, Sunlit Land, 78.

Today's News, April 17, 1965, 3.

Then I could easily compare notes that cited the same source and make sure everything was consistent. But how? Suddenly the solution struck me. (No, it didn't hurt.) I could put the notes into a sortable table. Since the notes were embedded, automatically numbering ones, I'd need my trusty NoteStripper program to strip them out as text. (If they had already been text at the end of the document, I could have put them into a table without first using NoteStripper.) Anyway, here's the procedure:

1. *Back up your document* in case something goes wrong.

2. If you've been working with Revision Tracking turned on, turn it off and make all revisions permanent. Otherwise, you'll run into problems with a bug that refuses to actually delete notes when Revision Tracking is on.

3. If you're not already working in Normal view, make the switch (View > Normal).

4. Open the notes pane (View > Footnotes).

5. With your cursor at the top of the notes pane, click "Edit > Replace."

6. In the "Find What" box, enter "[^013]([!^02])" (carriage returns not preceded by a note number; don't include the quotation marks). Yes, this will work on a Macintosh.

7. In the "Replace With" box, enter "@@@1" (again, without the quotation marks).

8. Put a checkmark in the "Use Wildcards" (or "Use Pattern Matching") checkbox. (You may have to click the "More" button to make this available.)

9. Click "OK" to make the replacements. Now all of your notes are (temporarily) just one paragraph long.

10. Use our NoteStripper program to strip notes to text. For note number format, select "Number with period and tab." When you're finished, all of your notes will be (unembedded) text at the bottom of your document.

11. Select all of the notes.

12. Click "Table" and then "Convert Text to Table." Set "Number of Columns" to 2. Set "Separate Text At" to tabs.

13. Click the "OK" button.

You should now have a table full of numbers and their corresponding notes. To sort the table alphabetically:

1. Your table should still be selected from step 13, above. If you've moved your cursor so it's no longer selected, put your cursor in the table and select the table (Table > Select Table). *Don't skip this step.* (I'll explain more below).

2. Click "Table" and then "Sort Text."

3. In the "Sort By" box, select "Column 2," which is the column holding your note text.

4. In the "Type" box, select "Text."

5. Click "Ascending" and "No Header Row."

6. Click the "OK" button.

Now your notes should be sorted alphabetically, and you can edit to your heart's content. (If your paragraph formatting is double spaced, you may want to change it to single spaced.) This is a pretty efficient way to work. You can easily spot typos or discrepancies in citations just by looking at the length of the lines:

10142 Jones, Sunlit Land, 24.

11773 Jones, Sunlit land, 33.

10044 Jones, Sunlit Land, 78.

If this weren't a monospaced font (sorry), the second line would be a little shorter than the other two, so you'd know something is off. Ah, there it is--that lowercased l on "land" should be capped.

You can also sort your notes numerically, if you want to look at them from that angle:

1. Put your cursor in the table and select the table (Table > Select Table). *Don't skip this step.* (I'll explain more below).

2. Click "Table" and then "Sort Text."

3. In the "Sort By" box, select "Column 1," which is the column holding your note numbers.

4. In the "Type" box, select "Number." (If you select "Text," your note numbers won't sort properly.)

5. Click "Ascending" and "No Header Row."

6. Click the "OK" button.

You can switch back and forth between alphabetical and numerical order as needed. Just be careful *not* to sort one column at a time (or change any of the note numbers--avoid globally finding and replacing numbers as you edit). If you do, you'll lose the correspondence between note numbers and their notes, which would be very, very bad. (Hence my emphasis on selecting the whole table before sorting. You kept that backup, right?) One way to avoid this entirely is to select the first column and format it as hidden, but then, before reembedding your notes (as explained below), you'll need to select the table and turn off the hidden formatting. Also, don't delete the @@@ markers that indicate paragraph breaks; you'll need them later to restore the breaks.

After you've finished editing your notes, you'll need NoteStripper again to get them back into your document as embedded, automatically numbered notes. Here's the procedure:

1. Select the table of numbers and (now-edited) notes (Table > Select Table).

2. Turn the table back to text (Table > Convert Table to Text; Separate Text with Tabs), which will give you a number and a tab preceding each note.

3. Use NoteStripper's "Text to Notes" feature to turn the text notes into embedded ones (see the documentation for instructions).

4. Open the notes pane (View > Footnotes).

5. Find "@@@" and replace with "^p" to restore your carriage returns.

That's it! If you're ever faced with a bunch of notes that need to be wrestled into submission, maybe this technique will help you as much as it did me. If your notes are simply text to begin with (not embedded), you can use the technique without NoteStripper.

You can learn more about NoteStripper (a terrific program) here:

http://www.editorium.com/15078.htm

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Francesca Flynn sent a few more thoughts about ideal editing software. She wrote:

A feature I'd love for copyediting: A "Style Chooser," not just a ms template, but complete grammar- and style- checkers for commonly used editorial styles such as Chicago Manual of Style and American Psychological Association. I'd love to be able to toggle a switch to "Chicago, 1st preferences" to have "extra" commas (per open-style punctuation) and so on be flagged.

I came across another "ideal software" idea -- something I'd like fixed in Word, anyway. (I use Word 97): I appreciate the dialog box "Do you want to save the changes you made to xxx.doc?" But I wish I could respond with, "I don't know -- were they important, or did I accidentally lean on the space bar?" If Microsoft declines to offer the necessary AI (artificially intelligent entity) as a free upgrade (to overwrite Clippy!), I would settle for another button in the save-changes dialog box: "Display changes." This would be especially helpful when I've had several interrelated documents open at once.

Francesca Flynn

Writing & Editing

Sebastopol, California

fkflynn@sonic.net

Thanks to Francesca for her comments.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

If you're interested in automating your notes and bibliographic references, you might want to investigate the EndNote software, which you can learn about here:

http://www.scisoftware.com/products/endnote_details/endnote_details.html

EndNote isn't the only game in town, however, although it is the best known. To learn about other contenders, see the overview of personal bibliographic software here:

http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/service/workshop/bib-overview.html

With some customization, Microsoft Word makes a pretty good tool for editing. The fact that it can be customized, in fact, is one of its finest features. I also like its use of styles, spell-checking, wildcard Find and Replace, and notes. There are also plenty of things I *don't* like, including Word's general "bugginess" and over-helpfulness. So I started thinking about what would make the ideal software for use in a publishing environment. What would that software look like? What features would it have?

So far, I have the following list, which includes some features that are already part of Word, others that are part of our Editorium software, and others that haven't been invented yet or are available in other programs:

1. Features designed specifically for editing, such as:

a. Batch Find and Replace using regular expressions (wildcards).

b. Quick and easy navigation.

c. Transposition of words and characters.

d. True title-case conversion.

e. Revision tracking and control.

f. Single-sourcing.

g. Automatically numbering notes and lists (that actually work).

h. Automatic backup and archiving.

2. Typesetting features:

a. Excellent hyphenation and justification.

b. Notes that can break over pages and be set in columns independent of body text.

c. Master pages for setup of headers, footers, folios, and so on.

d. Support for automatic ligatures, old-style numbers, and true small caps using master fonts.

e. Paragraph, character, and table styles.

f. "Long-document" features such as cross-referencing, indexing, and tables of contents.

g. "Book-building" features (in other words, a useable Master Document feature).

3. Indexing features with:

a. Embedded entries.

b. Display of entries sorted by page or alphabetically.

c. Real-time display of the index as it's being written.

d. Sorting word-by-word or letter-by-letter, with the ability to ignore introductory words and punctuation.

e. Word completion based on previous entries.

f. Automatic checking of cross-references.

4. The ability to export as:

a. PDF.

b. HTML.

c. HTML Help.

d. XML.

5. Cross-platform compatibility.

I know, I know: Dream on. But wouldn't it be great to have one program that did it all?

What would you add to the list? What would your ideal publishing software look like? Please let me know and I'll publish your response in the near future. You can send your ideas here: mailto:editor [at symbol] editorium.com.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Jacci Howard Bear has a great Web page on choosing desktop publishing software at About.com. Lots of reviews, comparisons, and other good information:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/softwarechoice/

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 can tell them apart). You can learn more about this here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700934923

One difficulty I've encountered with my custom template is distinguishing between different heading levels. I like to know at a glance how a heading is styled, without having to look at the formatting toolbar or the "style area," which you can learn about here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1710340695

To get around the problem, I've usually formatted my Heading 1 style in 22-point type, my Heading 2 style in 18-point type, and my Heading 3 style in 14-point type, with Heading 1 and 2 centered and Heading 3 flush left. This works okay, but if I need to add Heading 4 and Heading 5 (which is sometimes necessary), I start running out of formatting.

But I've recently discovered a nice solution: color!

Why not make Heading 1 red?

And Heading 2 blue?

And Heading 3 green?

And Heading 4 orange?

And Heading 5 brown?

You get the picture! Some of the standard Microsoft Word colors stand out well on a white background and are easily distinguishable from each other. These are, in my opinion, red, blue, green, orange, brown, pink, sky blue, bright green, and dark yellow (one for each of Word's nine heading levels), but feel free to use whatever works well for you.

You might want to arrange the heading level colors in a way that is easy to remember. The order I used above works for me. I split the colors into groups of three: red, green, and blue (commonly known as RGB); orange, brown, and pink (which makes no sense except that I like orange better than brown, and brown better than pink); and finally (in order of sky, lawn, and dirt), sky blue, bright green, and dark yellow. But you could use the (approximate) order of the spectrum, or maybe some mnemonic device based on the first letter of each word.

Whatever system you choose, using color makes it easy to see and identify heading levels, and it also makes a manuscript much more fun to read!

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READERS WRITE

After reading last week's newsletter about making punctuation big and bold, Hilary Powers wrote:

Enjoyed the newsletter, as always - but the current suggestion seems like an awful lot of work for a partial solution. I much prefer to edit in a font that has punctuation big enough to see... and everything else, too. If you have Lucida Console on your system, give it a try - it's both denser and easier to read than Courier New, and everything is clear. Even the dots for spaces with hidden characters turned on are the size of lentils. The similarity between en dashes and hyphens is the only problem for onscreen work, and that's easy to deal with.

It looks awful on paper, though, so you do have to change it - basically, switch templates - before giving the file to anyone who plans to print it.

Susan Bullowa wrote:

I highlight all punctuation marks using Search and Replace. No font fuss. Next time, I plan to develop nested macros (if I can in Word).

In a book I just worked on, the author's I's, me's, and my's were all highlighted because my editor asked me to make the book a bit less egocentric! It worked like a charm.

Karen MacKenzie, a Word moderator and WMVP at Woody's Lounge (see the Resources column, below), wrote:

Great tip! I've already placed style and macro in my normal.dot. But I did modify the replace so as to get it all in one fell swoop. The change as follows:

Wild Card search

Search for: [,.;:'"] (What you listed, but I omit the hyphens and dashes... too much for me!)

Replace with ^& (this tells Word to put back what it found)

Many thanks to Hilary, Susan, and Karen for their helpful thoughts and suggestions.

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RESOURCES

Woody's Lounge, as the name implies, is a great place to hang out and learn more about Word and other Microsoft stuff. Post questions, get answers, and help others with your ever-expanding knowledge. You can visit the lounge here:

http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/wwwthreads.pl

Don't forget to check out Woody's books and other goodies while you're there.

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 that's big and bold and colorful. Then record a macro to find and replace punctuation marks with themselves, formatted with your character style. Here's how:

Creating the Paragraph Style

1. Click the "Format" menu.

2. Click "Style" (in Word 2002, "Styles and Formatting").

3. Click the "New" button (in Word 2002, "New Style").

4. In the "Name" box, type a name for your new style--"Punctuation," maybe, or "Jots and Tittles."

5. In the "Style type" box, select "Character."

6. Click the "Format" button.

7. Click "Font."

8. If it's not already selected, click the "Font" tab.

9. Under "Font," select a font you'd like to use, but make sure it has easily distinguishable punctuation marks. Times New Roman is my all-time favorite for this purpose.

10. Under "Font style," select "Bold."

11. Under "Size," select something nice and big. Try 18 points for starters (for text that is regularly 12 points). You can adjust this as you like.

12. Under "Font color," select red or blue--whatever you like.

13. Click the "OK" button.

14. Click the next "OK" button.

15. Click the "Close" button (except in Word 2002).

Recording the Macro

1. Click the "Tools" menu.

2. Click "Macro."

3. Click "Record New Macro."

4. In the "Macro name" box, give your macro a name, something like "BigPunctuation" (no spaces allowed in macro names).

5. If you like, assign the macro to a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut by clicking the appropriate buttons and following the prompts on your screen.

6. If necessary, click the "Close" button. You should now see the macro recording toolbar with its two buttons, which means Word is now recording what you do.

7. Click the "Edit" menu.

8. Click "Replace."

9. In the "Find what" box, enter some punctuation you want to include--let's say a comma.

10. In the "Replace with" box, enter the same punctuation you included in the "Find what" box.

11. Click the "Format" button (you may need to click the "More" button before this is available).

12. Click "Style."

13. Select your new style from the list.

14. Click the "OK" button.

15. Make sure the "Search" box says "All."

16. Click the "Replace All" button. That will replace all of your commas with themselves but formatted with your new style.

17. Repeat steps 7 through 16 for each punctuation mark you want to format with your new style. I recommend periods, commas, semicolons, colons, single quotation marks, double quotation marks, hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, and anything else you have trouble seeing. Don't overdo it, though. The point is to *see* the little stuff, not to get lost in a forest of overgrown punctuation.

18. Click the "Tools" menu.

19. Click "Macro."

20. Click "Stop Recording."

Now run the macro (Tools > Macro > Macros > [select the macro] > Run), and it will format your punctuation so it's easy to see. Of course, the macro will remain available for future use--you don't have to record it every time you do this.

A possible drawback to all of this is that the enlarged punctuation may expand your line spacing here and there, making your document look kind of funny. But if you can live with that, you'll probably come to like working with those "big commas." Another drawback is that any new punctuation you *type* in the document won't be big, bold, and colorful--unless you format it with the new style or run the macro periodically, but that seems like a lot of extra work to me. There is another solution, but that's a subject for another day.

"How do I get rid of the big formatting after I've finished editing?" you're now asking. The easiest way is just to delete the style from the document. But don't forget to do it! Otherwise, your client will think you're pretty weird. Here's the procedure:

1. Click the "Format" menu.

2. Click "Style" (in Word 2002, "Styles and Formatting").

3. Select the style you created earlier to format your punctuation.

4. Click the "Delete" button (in Word 2002, you must first click the dropdown arrow on the right of the style's name).

5. When Word asks if you really want to delete the style, click the "Yes" button.

6. Click the "Close" button (except in Word 2002).

Now all of your perfectly edited punctuation will be returned to its regular formatting.

You'll thank me when you go to the optometrist.

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RESOURCES

Charles Kenyon's Microsoft Word FAQ includes an astounding amount of information about Microsoft Word. You'll find tips, tutorials, downloads, links, and lots of other stuff. Explore and enjoy!

http://www.addbalance.com/word/index.htm

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."

4. Put a check in the box labeled "Track changes while editing." (While you're there, you can also decide whether or not to show ["highlight"] changes on your screen or in the printed document.)

5. Click the "OK" button.

Or, what the heck, just double-click the "TRK" box in the status bar at the bottom of your screen. You can also right-click the box to set various options.

One of the options is what color to use to designate deletions and additions--blue, turquoise, and so on (scroll down to see the more unusual colors). The most interesting color is the one labeled "By author." What's it do? Well, my own "author" color, by default, is red. If, however, I open a document from you, your tracked changes will show up in a different color, probably blue. So "By author" tells word to assign a different color to changes from a different user. How does Word know the document is from a different user? Because of the name that was specified under Tools > Options > User Information > Name when the document was created.

And that suggests an interesting trick. If you're going to track changes, why not track different *kinds* of changes in a way that will be helpful to you? The most obvious application of this idea would be to track big changes (such as moving paragraphs around) and small changes (such as moving commas around) separately. All you have to do is change the name under User Information to something like "Big Changes" before getting out the cleaver, and to something like "Little Changes" before getting out the tweezers. The obvious advantage of this is that little changes then show up in a different color *inside* of big changes, which doesn't happen if you make all of your changes using the same user name (and thus the same color).

You can even record each name change in its own macro and assign those macros to menus, toolbar buttons, or keyboard shortcuts for easy access. You can learn more about doing so here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706651129

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

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

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707100224

(Reader's Write column)

After you've finished marking big and little changes (or whatever), don't forget to set your user name back to your actual name.

Now, there are plenty of changes you probably don't want to track at all. For example, before I ever start reading a document, I first clean up multiple spaces, multiple paragraph breaks, and lots of other stuff that gets in the way of real editing. I do this with Track Changes turned off (using our FileCleaner and MegaReplacer programs) because I don't consider these to be significant changes. I don't want to review them, and I don't think my authors care about reviewing them. I do, however, want to have any significant changes available for review, and the tracking trick of changing the user name makes this eminently doable.

You can learn about FileCleaner here:

http://www.editorium.com/14845.htm

And you can learn about MegaReplacer here:

http://www.editorium.com/14843.htm

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READERS WRITE

After reading about using background colors in last week's newsletter, Chuck Tucker (ctucker@ieee.org) wrote:

I don't know about your version of Word, but background colors (other than white on blue) only work in Normal view. They go away when you switch back to Print View.

I have a couple of other observations.

1. When I switch to Normal view with ToolsOptionsView Style Area Width set greater than zero I get the usual display of styles along the left margin.

2. When I set a new background color in the Normal view the styles in the margin disappear (Area Width = 0)??

3. Switching back to Print Layout view gets rid of the background.

4. Switching back to Normal view omits the background color and returns the Styles in the margin.

Go figure?

However, if you simply use the standard "white on blue background" option, then the Styles margin display remains when switching back and forth.

Thanks to Chuck for sending these "gotchas."

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RESOURCES

The Microsoft Office "Tools on the Web" site offers some terrific instruction on using the Track Changes feature:

http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/legal/track%20changes.asp