I get manuscripts with all kinds of weird formatting, but recently I got one from which all formatting had been removed. That might have been all right, but the note reference numbers were no longer superscript; they all looked something like this.42 I wasn't about to fix all those by hand, so I came up with this solution, which I hope you'll find as useful as I did:
1. Back up your documents, just in case.
2. Call up Word's Replace dialog (Edit > Replace).
3. In the "Find What" box, enter this (just copy and paste it from this article):
([! 0123456789,:$(])([0-9]{1,})
4. In the "Replace With" box, enter this:
1
5. Click the "More" button if it's available.
6. Put a check in the "Use wildcards" checkbox.
7. Click the "Replace All" button.
8. In the "Find What" box, enter this:
9. In the "Replace With" box, enter this (formatted as superscript):
1
10. Click the "Replace All" button.
All of your note numbers should now be in glorious superscript.
Want to know more about two-step finding and replacing?
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706553959
Want to know more about wildcard searching?
http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip
Want to know how to remove directly applied document formatting without removing superscript, italic, bold, and so on?
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1709845068
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READERS WRITE
After reading last week's newsletter with its editorial style sheet macros, Jim Pinkham wrote:
You can also overcome the limitation on having only two Word docs open to make Hilary's macro run by simply specifying the windows you wish to switch between in the macro. For example, here's a snippet from one of mine:
Selection.SelectRow
Selection.Cut
Windows("Blue Rows.doc").Activate
Selection.Paste
Windows("Weekly Improvement Analysis March 22-28.doc").Activate
When I use this macro, I'll create a new "Weekly Improvement Analysis" doc each time--so I simply edit the file name accordingly.
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Pamela Angulo wrote:
As I read today's newsletter, 2004/05/05: Editorial Style Sheet Macro, I wondered why anyone editing and creating a style sheet on a computer would be concerned about pasting copied style terms by letter or in alphabetical order. (Organizing terms by type--names, places, scientific terminology, etc.--now, that I understand.)
I copy terms to my style sheet as I go, in the order they present themselves--more or less from top to bottom of the manuscript. For some jobs (e.g., chapters by multiple authors for the same book, or individual articles for inclusion in a single magazine issue), I keep track of chapter, article, or author for each term as well. But however I handle the initial list, I sort the terms alphabetically later, *not* while I'm copying and pasting (too much time, and too much brain!).
I create different versions of the style sheet for different purposes: A single comprehensive alphabetical list for a multiple-part project allows me and the proofreader to cross-check terms across the entire project, which is always helpful; several individual alphabetical lists sorted by chapter, article, or author allow me to send only the relevant list to each author for review.
With Table > Sort in Word, arranging my style sheet in alpha order is a no-brainer, and I like that after a long day at the helm. 🙂 BTW, some people don't realize that this command will work on *any* list; the list doesn't have to be in a table.
A while back, a copyeditor posted to Freelance asking how to convert her style sheet into a table so she could sort it. It struck me *hard* then that one person's "no duh!" (it's soooo obvious) is very often another person's "no way!" (never would have thought of that).
Many thanks to Jim and Pamela for their helpful tips and observations.
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RESOURCES
The EServer TCLibrary of editing articles has a wealth of information on all kinds of publishing topics. Wow, look at all this great stuff!
http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Editing
