All this talk about editorial style sheets in the past couple of newsletters got me thinking again about lists of automatic corrections. Long ago, I wrote about this and provided a couple of such lists:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708048908
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708127357
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708293844
I now realize, however, that those lists don't include nearly as many typographical errors as they could. I'm talking about errors like these:
abbout (about)
yeild (yield)
yera (year)
yoiu (you)
yoiur (your)
So here, for your editorial pleasure, is a giant list (more than 1,200 entries) compiled from various typo and AutoCorrect collections:
http://www.editorium.com/ftp/typolist.zip
The list is currently set up for use with our MegaReplacer program, with entries like this:
abbout|about+w
yeild|yield+w
yera|year+w
yoiu|you+w
yoiur|your+w
Words before the pipe symbol (|) contain the typos. Words after the pipe symbol are their replacements. And the +w at the end of each entry tells Word to search for "Whole words only." MegaReplacer will run such a list on the active document, all open documents, or all documents in a folder, fixing all of the typos in one fell swoop.
Of course, Word's spell checker will also catch these typos--if you want to click, click, click through them all manually. But why not put MegaReplacer to work while you do something more worthwhile? Of course, running that giant list on a bunch of documents could take a while, so you might want to (1) pare down the list to include only those entries you think you'll really need and (2) run it on fewer documents at a time. You can learn more about MegaReplacer here:
http://www.editorium.com/14843.htm
You might also want to use some of these entries (minus the pipe symbols and +w's) in your AutoCorrect list (some of them are probably already there). Feel free!
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FROM WORD 2K TO 2003: WORD'S TASK PANES VBA REFERENCE
Wordmeister Steve Hudson sent his most recent article in his series about Word 2003--a sneak preview especially for Editorium Update readers before the article is published elsewhere. The article covers one of Word's most important features, the Task Pane, with an emphasis on VBA, and Steve covers the topic in almost unbelievable detail. If you want the real scoop, look no further. You can download Steve's article by clicking here:
http://www.editorium.com/ftp/taskpane.zip
Steve also wrote:
I'd like to advise you and your readers to avoid Outlook 2003. It has more bugs than the NSW locust plague here in Australia at the moment. I could fill an article with simple features that cause immediate failures.
If you are happy to live with plain text emails, you get fewer problems. Not none, fewer. Rules are broken, insofar as there are several options that crash Outlook when you select them. Contacts has a few problems that sporadically cause crashes; even picking names from your address book goes belly up regularly. 🙁 No Service Packs as of yet.
I'm putting up with it, as the rest of Office 2003 is very nice.
Many thanks to Steve for doing intense research on Office 2003 and making it available for our use.
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READERS WRITE
Andrew Savikas wrote:
Two quick tips came to mind while I was checking out your archives that might interest readers of your newsletter:
1. The primary motivation for most users when re-assigning the Insert key is to avoid accidental invocation of the cursed Overtype feature; adding a new function to the Insert key is just a bonus. To accomplish the former semi-permanently, just intercept the command:
Sub Overtype()
' Do nothing (or do something else)
End Sub
Then users can re-assign or un-assign the Insert key at will, without any fear of Overtype returning.
[For more information, see the past newsletters here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1701260280
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1701366500]
2. Style aliases are indispensable but can cause problems when exporting to a different format. This macro removes them (Word 2000+ for Windows):
Sub RemoveStyleAliases()
Dim sty As Style
For Each sty In ActiveDocument.Styles
sty.NameLocal = Split(sty.NameLocal, ",")(0)
Next sty
End Sub
[For more information, see the past newsletter here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703188741]
If you don't know how to use such macros, you can find out here.
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Meg Cox wrote:
Some editors don't like to alphabetize an editorial style sheet as they go along. For me, it's essential if the style sheet is to be usable--especially in a book with a million personal and place names, and especially if it's about an unfamiliar geographical region.
Without keeping the style sheet in alphabetical order, I'm not going to spot the close-but-not-quite situations. Case in point: in my style-sheet-nightmare project, the author was rendering the names every which way. Was it Leon Mba or Leon M'ba? With an accent on the e or not? Denis Sassou-Nguesso with or without the accent, with or without the hyphen? Sassou-Nguesso as surname only, or just Nguesso? Or Sassou Nguesso? Some names appeared infrequently enough that I never would have been able to remember whether they had come up before and how they had been rendered. (This 700-page manuscript covered politics in 14 francophone African countries over a period of 120 years.)
Even in easier projects, it's the alphabetization that enables me to spot the inconsistencies as I go along so I can change them all to the same thing. In the 14-countries project, it would have been no easy matter to go back and search and replace later because the versions of the names varied too widely, so I had to decide on the first occasion of each inconsistency. If the author wanted to go with a version different from what I had settled on, once they were all consistent I would have been able to do a global search and replace. (Thank goodness in this case cleanup was in-house!)
If I wasn't working in history and political science, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
As it turned out, I didn't come up with a good way to do what I wanted to do. Maybe I could have with more fiddling, but I finally needed to just give up and keep moving through all the names.
Many thanks to Andrew and Meg for their helpful tips and comments.
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RESOURCES
The Design Science site has some marvelous advanced tutorials on Word's AutoCorrect feature:
http://www.dessci.com/en/support/tutorials/autocorrect/tutorial.htm
http://www.dessci.com/en/support/tutorials/autocorrect/advanced.htm
