Restoring Missing Notes
November 17, 2004 – 12:00 pmA couple of years ago, I wrote an article on fixing messed-up footnotes and endnotes in Microsoft Word. You can read the article here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17103078 42
This week, however, I ran into a new variety of “messed-upness” that I thought you might like to know about. If you want to see the problem in action, you can replicate it. For starters, do this:
1. Open a document and switch to Normal view (View > Normal).
2. Insert a footnote (Insert > Reference > Footnote).
3. Type a little text into your nice, new footnote.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have, oh, three or four notes in your document.
Now, let’s say you were a clueless author who wanted to delete a footnote. What would you do? Delete the note number in body text? Bzzzt. Wrong. That’s what you’d do if you knew what you were doing. A clueless author would do what I saw this week: Open the Notes pane (View > Footnotes), select a note, and hit the DELETE key.
Go ahead, try it.
If you selected the entire footnote, including the final carriage return, you should have seen this message:
Microsoft Office Word Err=1156
This is not a valid action for footnotes.
Word is upset because you tried to delete that final carriage return, which isn’t a normal carriage return but a special note carriage return that can’t be deleted. (Why the error message doesn’t say something straightforward like “You can’t delete the final carriage return in a note; please delete the note in the body of your document” is known only to some programmer at Microsoft.) At any rate, if you want to delete a note, you must do so in the body of your document, which will automatically delete the note including its carriage return.
But if you’re a clueless author, what will you do? You’ll go to the Notes pane and delete everything *except* the last carriage return. That will leave your notes looking like this (with asterisks representing carriage returns):
1 Text of note 1.*
2 Text of note 2.*
*
4 Text of note 4.*
Wait a minute. Where’s note 3? Our author deleted it, of course, leaving nothing but its undeletable carriage return. So, there’s your clue that this problem exists: a missing note number with a carriage return in its place. (If you want to see the returns, click the Show/Hide [pilcrow] button on Word’s Standard toolbar.)
Okay, enough griping–and my apologies to any authors or editors I’ve offended. Here’s how to fix the problem:
1. Select and copy the note number of some *other* note. In this case, 4 would do nicely.
2. Move your cursor to the spot where the number for note 3 should be–in other words, in front of the orphaned carriage return.
3. Paste the note number at that spot.
Surprise! Rather than getting another note number 4, you get note number 3–exactly what you needed. What you pasted isn’t a number but a magic code that generates note numbers in sequence. Thus, note 3.
Now you can type some text after the new note number, if you like, or you can go into the body of your document and delete the note properly (you could also do that without first fixing the note number). Then make a friendly phone call to your author and politely explain how to delete notes in Word.
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READERS WRITE
Hannah Hyam, after reading Hilary Powers’s tip on copying and pasting tracked changes in the August 19 newsletter, wrote:
You can also copy and paste tracked changes using the Spike:
1. With Track Changes ON, select the text you want to paste and cut it to Spike (CTRL + F3). If you only want to copy, not cut it, press CTRL + Z immediately after to restore the text.
2. Turn Track Changes off and insert the text where required (CTRL + SHIFT + F3). The changes are retained.
3. Don’t forget to turn Tracked Changes back on to continue editing.
I hope this is as helpful to others as it has been to me–and thanks for all the other invaluable tips, macros, etc. that you publish in Editorium Update. It’s an invaluable resource.
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After reading the newsletter for September 29, which had to do with adjusting line spacing (leading) in Word, Anne-Marie Concepcion wrote:
I’ve been meaning to whine to you about the following passage you wrote in a recent Editorium about leading in Word [Editor’s note: I really like Anne-Marie’s “whine.”]:
“‘In the end, no spread of continuous text should have to run more than a single line short or a single line long.’ In other words, a little editing may be in store. You may have to remove a few words here, add a few there, and maybe break or join existing paragraphs. Remember when we used to do that?
“We don’t do it anymore because today’s major typesetting programs (QuarkXPress, InDesign, FrameMaker, and Ventura) can use vertical justification (feathering) to align the bottoms of pages. The problem is that then 13 points of leading isn’t really 13 points; it’s 13.5 or 14 or something else altogether–definitely *not* traditional typesetting. In some publications, you can actually see how “spacey” the lines have become, and it doesn’t make for beautiful typography. Nevertheless, I sometimes wish Word had that ability. Until it does, we’re basically limited to setting type the old-fashioned way. And I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.”
My whine has to do with the fact that I have *never* encountered any professional graphic designer use vertical justification in this way–to even out bottom lines of text in pages. I think people who use these programs you list–likely working designers–are more aware than anyone how horrid it would look to have two pages of the same continuous story carry different leading! [Editor’s note: I was relieved to hear this, because the designers and typesetters at the publishing house where I work routinely use vertical justification, much to my dismay.]
(Besides which, when you use vertical justification, that feature first adds/removes spacing between paragraphs; then, as a last resort, it changes the leading value.)
Designers do the math (leading/space above for each style sheet in even increments) you cite routinely to get leading equalized across pages and columns, and/or they use the layout program’s “Lock to Baseline Grid” feature to help enforce it.
With this feature, you set a baseline starting point and increment amount (starting point = top margin, increment = body text leading) in the program’s preferences. The program forces all text’s baselines to grid positions, overriding any leading you set manually or in style sheets.
Normally this is used for publications like magazines, books, journals, and newspapers, where baselines need to line up across the page/spread and the bottom line needs to sit at the bottom across the board.
For less formal publications like brochures and some newsletters, the designer doesn’t employ Lock to Baseline Grid. Different stories on a page may have different leading–captions, body text, space above subheads, sidebars, callouts, etc. But they still make sure that a single story carries the same leading for its body text throughout.
The Vertical Justification feature is actually seldom used. When it *is* used, it’s mainly for standalone stories–for example, a sidebar that’s the same height as the story columns it accompanies. It would be a quick and dirty way to get the text to “fill up” the vertical space–again, mainly employing space in between paragraphs, not leading.
Many thanks to Hannah and Anne-Marie.
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RESOURCES
Anne-Marie Concepcion (see Readers Write, above), publisher of DesignGeek newsletter, brought to our attention this fascinating online video about letterpress printing:
http://elsa.photo.net/video/firefly-small.mov
You can learn more about DesignGeek here:
http://senecadesign.com/tips-pubs/designgeek.html
Thanks again to Anne-Marie.
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THE FINE PRINT
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