Category Archives: Editorial Matters

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 Editing, Macros, Microsoft Word | Comments closed

Lyonizing Word: Inside Notes

By americaneditor | Published: July 18, 2016

by Jack Lyon As useful as they are, Microsoft Word’s footnotes and endnotes are amazingly easy to mess up. Let’s look at some ways that can happen — and how to fix the problems. First, we need to open a document that has footnotes — or make one. Then, to really see what’s going on, […]

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Lyonizing Word: Why Computers?

By americaneditor | Published: November 18, 2015

by Jack Lyon Dan A. Wilson, of The Editor’s Desktop, once advised editors that a computer is “far and away your most valuable tool, your ultimate enabler, your brain’s second-in-command. A brain with a pencil in its hand cannot compete — indeed, cannot even credibly challenge — a brain with a computer and computer-sophistication at […]

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Lyonizing Word: Assigning Macro Shortcut Keys

By americaneditor | Published: August 31, 2015

Learning how to assign keyboard combinations to macros may seem like a small thing, but small things add up to greater editing efficiency, and that means more money in your pocket and less time at work, both of which are big things.

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Lyonizing Word: We Can Do This the Easy Way, or . . .

By americaneditor | Published: May 27, 2015

We Can Do This the Easy Way, or We Can Do This the Hard Way by Jack Lyon American Editor Rich Adin called me recently with a puzzle. He was editing a list of citations that looked like this: Lyon J, Adin R, Poole L, Brenner E, et al: blah blah blah. But his client […]

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The Business of Editing: Wildcarding for Dollars

By americaneditor | Published: February 18, 2015

I can tell you from the project I am working on now that wildcarding has saved me hours of toiling. I have already had several chapters with 400 or more references that were not in the correct format. Wildcarding let me clean up author names, as here, and let me change cites from 1988;52(11):343-45 to 52:343, 1988 in minutes.

Also posted in Business of Editing, Computers and Software, Editing Tools, Financial Matters | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Responses

Lyonizing Word: Finding and Replacing Upper- and Lowercase

By americaneditor | Published: December 29, 2014

Finding and Replacing Upper- and Lowercase by Jack Lyon Rich Adin, the proprietor of this blog, recently sent me an interesting question. He wrote: I need a wildcard find and replace, assuming it can be done by wildcards, that searches for the following Abrams: alpha booby: alarm and replaces it with Abrams: Alpha booby: Alarm […]

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Lyonizing Word: Deleting Extraneous Carriage Returns in Footnotes and Endnotes

By americaneditor | Published: March 31, 2014

One mistake authors make is to insert extraneous carriage returns before or after a note. Why? Because they don’t like the positioning of the note on the page, which they’re trying to make “pretty,” not understanding the problems that will cause in editing and typesetting.

Also posted in Computers and Software, Contributor Article, Guest Article, Lyonizing Word | Tagged , , | 6 Responses