Archive for January, 2002

Unicode

Wednesday, January 30th, 2002

In the beginning was ASCII, and ASCII was limited–128 characters wasn’t enough. So Microsoft extended it to 256–still not enough. True, you could now access “foreign-language” and other special characters by using “code pages” with different fonts in Microsoft Word. If you’ve clicked Insert > Symbol and then changed the font on the drop-down list in the Symbol dialog, you’ve seen how this works: the same character “position” (or number) often displays a different character in different fonts.

(more…)

Spaces

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2002

Microsoft Word comes with four kinds of spaces:

* word spaces

* nonbreaking spaces

(more…)

Ellipses

Wednesday, January 16th, 2002

[Last week’s newsletter featured an article on British and American spelling. Thank goodness a reader who actually knows about such things sent some corrections. Please see the Readers Write column (below the main article) for details. I’ll postpone my article on British to American translation (bonnet/hood) until I’ve verified my list with more than just Internet research. :) ]

(more…)

British and American Spelling

Wednesday, January 9th, 2002

Have you ever needed to change spelling from British English to American English or vice versa? One way to do this is to change the language format of your Word document and then do a spell check. For example, if you needed to change spelling from British to American, you could change the language format from British to American English. Then the spell checker would catch such words as “capitalise” and “colour.” To try this approach, follow this procedure:

(more…)

Disappearing Character Formatting

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2002

Part of my editing process is applying paragraph styles (like Heading 1) to a manuscript. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed an annoying bug: Applying the paragraph style often makes character formatting (such as italics) disappear. You can see this for yourself:

(more…)


Close
Email+ It