This week I received the electronic manuscript of a book I'm going to edit--a collection of talks presented by various scholars at a symposium. Looking through the first talk, I noticed that the footnotes were a mess. The author had used Microsoft Word's automatically numbering notes, sure enough, but then he'd typed a period after each automatically numbered superscript note number. What *was* he thinking? Those periods after the superscripts sure looked weird. How could I get rid of them? A wildcard search! Here's the procedure:
1. Switch to Normal view (View > Normal) if you're not already there.
2. Open the notes pane (View > Footnotes).
3. With your cursor at the top of the notes pane, open the Replace dialog (Edit > Replace).
4. In the "Find What" box, enter this:
(^02).
The parentheses consititute a wildcard "group" containing the ASCII code for automatic note reference numbers. And, of course, they're followed by a period. You can learn more about wildcard grouping here:
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706267069
And you can learn more about searching with codes here:
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703875043
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703968584
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1704081834
Why not just use ^f to find the footnote numbers? Because the wildcard search engine will give you an error message if you try.
5. In the "Replace With box, enter this:
1
That's the "find what expression" code, and it represents whatever was found with (^02)--in other words, a note number. But we've excluded the period since we want periods to go away.
6. Put a check in the "Use Wildcards" (or "Use Pattern Matching") checkbox. (You may need to click the "More" button before this is available.)
7. Click the "Replace All" button.
In my bad, bad document, that did the trick.
I opened the next chapter and looked at the notes first thing. Wow, messier still. Incredibly, this author had used Word's automatically numbered footnotes to create the note reference numbers in the text, but then she'd typed her notes after the body text, leaving the footnotes pane completely empty (except for the now-meaningless note numbers). Good grief! How was I supposed to fix that? Well, at least the note text was intact at the end of the document. Now I had to replace those automatic reference numbers with superscript text numbers. Time to write a macro! Here's the version for Word 97 or higher:
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "^02"
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute
Do While Selection.Find.Found
i = i + 1
Selection.TypeText Text:=Str$(i)
Selection.Find.Execute
Loop
If you don't know how to use macros like that one, see the article here.
You may recognize this macro as a "repeating macro," as described in the March 20, 2002, issue of Editorium Update:
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1709891370
Here's the version of the macro for Word 6 and 7 (95):
EditFind .Find = "^02", .Direction = 0, .MatchCase = 0, .WholeWord = 0, .PatternMatch = 0, .SoundsLike = 0, .Format = 0, .Wrap = 1, .FindAllWordForms = 0
While EditFindFound()
i = i + 1
Insert LTrim$(Str$(i))
EditFind
Wend
The macro finds an automatic footnote reference number (^02), increments a plain old number in the computer's memory (i = i + 1), and then types over the top of the reference number with the incremented number (Selection.TypeText Text:=Str$(i)). *Don't* use this macro on documents that have properly working notes. It will delete the notes (and thus the note text), leaving only superscript numbers in their place.
Running the macro took care of my problem but left me with another: how to turn those text notes into automatically numbered ones so I didn't have to manually renumber as I edited the piece. I could have created a bunch of new footnotes by hand, pasting the note text into each one--if I'd wanted to be inefficient. Luckily, there's a better solution: the "Text to Notes" feature of my trusty NoteStripper program, which I used, and which you can learn more about here:
http://www.editorium.com/15078.htm
Gritting my teeth, I opened the third article and looked at the notes. Yes, also messed up. This guy had used Word's automatic notes feature but then opened the footnotes pane, *deleted* the note number (an invitation to file corruption if there ever was one), and *manually typed in* note numbers and periods. Grrrr. *Now* what? This one needed drastic measures. I selected all of the notes in the footnotes pane, copied them (they were nothing but text, so why not?), and pasted them at the end of the document. Then I used that macro again to turn the note reference numbers into superscript text. Finally, I used NoteStripper's "Text to Notes" feature to turn the text notes into automatically numbering ones.
And the rest of the articles? About a third of them used notes correctly. The rest were a mess, just like the first three. If you're ever faced with this kind of stuff, maybe this article will help.
_________________________________________
READERS WRITE
After reading last week's article on cross-referencing footnotes (which used gibberish text in the examples), Toni Knapp wrote:
Jack Lyon's information would have been very useful if it had been written in English. What was the purpose of the (foreign?) gibberish? The cross-referencing process made no sense to me.
I replied:
The foreign gibberish is just nonsense text used as an example, so readers don't confuse what the example paragraphs *say* with the text of the article itself. For example, I could have written the examples like this:
This is some text^1 that you might use in your document. When you use that text^2 you'll see what it looks like.^3
But in doing so, there's a danger that readers won't see the text as an example but rather as part of the article itself. So the safer route (and actually the traditional route) is to use nonsense text, like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,^1 consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy^2 nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.^3
Sorry if that was confusing. Using nonsense text is actually a publishing tradition that goes back nearly to the time of Gutenberg, when type samples were printed in garbled Latin so that readers would pay attention to what the type samples *looked* like rather than what the type samples said. You can read more about sample text in my newsletter here:
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705763701
Toni responded:
I'm quite familiar with (and use) nonsense text, but primarily as filler material in book dummies, layouts, etc. Used in an example for cross referencing, however, it did not work for me personally. I was too busy trying to decipher the nonsense. :o)
Probably a good point. If you, gentle reader, sometimes use nonsense text, you might want to be sure that it's not confusing in the context where you're using it.
Thanks to Toni for her question and response.
_________________________________________
RESOURCES
Knopf Online offers a great "Tips & Resources" page for "technical writers, Help authors, and other information developers." See especially the article "Coping with Word's Autonumbering 'Feature'" on the right side of the page:
http://www.knopf.com/resources.html
