Typesetting Tips for Word
I can’t leave the topic of typesetting without explaining some of the things I learned on the last book I typeset–in Microsoft Word. The book had more than 400 pages and several hundred footnotes, and Word would have handled it better if I’d been more particular about the following:
1. Pull all the chapters together into a single document.
2. Set up pages as explained here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17160189 42
3. Set up text block and margins as explained here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17158875 87
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17176211 83
4. Set up running heads and footers as explained here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17161470 63
But while you’re doing that, please consider this additional advice:
5. Insert a “Next page” section break for *each page* that requires a different kind of running head or folio (including *no* running head or folio) than the previous section (Insert > Break > Next page). In the front matter, that’s quite a few section breaks. Each chapter should also be a separate section (be preceded by a section break). All of these section breaks should be of the “Next page” variety. If you use an “Even page” or “Odd page” section break, Word will try to take control, in its usual “helpful” way, and you don’t want that to happen.
6. After inserting a section break, *always* turn off “Link to previous” for both header *and* footer (View > Header and footer > Link to previous [fourth icon from the left]). To move from header to footer, click the “Switch between header and footer” button (third icon from the left). Again, turn off “Link to previous.” That means you’ll need to insert folios (page numbers) and running heads separately for each section. It’s a pain, but it’s the only way to make sure Word does exactly what you want it to.
7. Set up the layout for each section by clicking File > Page Setup > Layout. “Section start” should always be “New page.” If you need to make sure a chapter starts on an odd page, you may have to insert an additional break. Under “Headers and footers,” check both “Different odd and even” and “Different first page.” Under “Preview,” set “Apply to” as “This section.” Then click OK.
8. To insert page numbers, go to the beginning of your document (CTRL + HOME). Click View > Header and footer. If you want folios in the header, click the # icon. To specify arabic or roman numbers and what number to start with in the current section, click the “Format page number” icon (third from the left). If you want folios in the footer instead, first click the “Switch between header and footer” button.
9. To go to the next header (or footer), click the “Show next” button (icon on the far right). Very handy. Use this button to jump from header to header and footer to footer. If you followed the instructions in step 2, you’ll have three separate headers and three separate footers in each chapter. After you’ve played around with this, along with the “Show previous” button, you’ll understand what’s going on here.
10. After doing the steps above, turn off automatic repagination. If you don’t, Word will sometimes repaginate your whole document on even minor changes, which will eventually make you feel like throwing your computer out the window–even more than you do now. To turn off repagination, switch to Normal View (View > Normal). Click Tools > Options > General and clear the Background Repagination box. Word will now (mostly) refrain from repaginating unless you print, switch to Print Preview or Print Layout view, compile a table of contents or index, or do a word count. If necessary, you can reenable automatic repagination by rechecking the Background Repagination box.
11. If for some reason you need to *delete* a section break, *carefully* check nearby headers and footers to make sure something didn’t go wacko.
12. After you think you have everything the way you want it, you can check your layout in spreads as explained here:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17162695 02
You’ll find other information on typesetting in Word here:
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708754845
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708956278
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711888513
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711932079
http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1712050217
If these tips help you avoid some of the pitfalls into which I pitfell, writing this article will have been well worth the trouble.
Next week: Creating a press-ready PDF from Microsoft Word.
_________________________________________
READERS WRITE
Bruce Howarth wrote:
Thanks for your typesetting sequence–very interesting.
In case no-one else mentions it, a good editor for pure LaTeX documents is WinEdt. Like all of the tools, it has a large and somewhat non-intuitive interface for the setting up stage, but it color-codes LaTeX commands and has a quite powerful regular expression search facility (wild cards, to Word devotees). It also interfaces “naturally” to MikTeX and other LaTeX compilers.
—————————
Franz-Josef Knelangen wrote:
Check out “Calamus.” It’s a German product, but it has a U.S. version too:
—————————
RagTime is another program worth looking at. Footnotes? Yep. Good layout and typography? Yep. Windows *and* Mac? Yep. Free version for noncommercial use (and trying out)? Yep. Why didn’t I find this before? I don’t know. Check it out here:
http://www.ragtime-online.com/
—————————
Mats Broberg wrote:
I came across your newsletters on “Excellent Typesetting” when searching for information about high-end typesetting solutions myself, and I found them to be very interesting.
I too am looking for alternatives to programs like InDesign and FrameMaker and have tried out LaTeX and ConTeXt. They both seem very promising, but I am a bit deterred when I realize how difficult it is to install and use new typefaces. There’s a 100-page manual about font installation in LaTeX.
The solution I am looking into right now is Dr. Jeffrey H. Kingston’s high-level formatting language Lout. The syntax seems easier to grasp, and font installation is a breeze, compared to LaTeX.
Here are a few links you may find interesting. Lout uses TeX’s paragraph-breaking algorithm (with minor changes) and should indeed be capable of outputting excellent typesetting.
http://lout.sourceforge.net/ (primary site at SourceForge)
http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~jeff/ (Dr. Kingston’s own pages)
So far, ConTeXt leads, I think, and ConTeXt’s font installation is easier than for LaTeX (but still difficult).
I was very impressed by Kytek’s Autopage module for QuarkXPress (USD 7000, which is a pity), which handles automatic footnotes in QuarkXPress. Rumor has it that they are working on something similar for InDesign. Also, 3B2’s Core Publishing System is very highly regarded–but at a price of EUR 9000.
Download the PDF for Autopage and zoom in on those dialog boxes they show. Very, very interesting.
—————————
Richard A. O’Regan wrote:
I followed your suggestion and sent off feedback to Adobe InDesign asking for footnotes, but meanwhile I have also taken a further look at Apple’s new “Pages,” part of what they call “iWork.” It is so logical, so simple, so easy to use that I am quite amazed.
When you first look at it, you have the impression that it is just another program written for the “masses” who want simple-minded prepared templates for newsletters, school reports, etc., with lots of multimedia attachments like photos and music. Not for the likes of us 500-page, footnote-encumbered strugglers.
But I am not so sure that it doesn’t meet most of our needs. Unfortunately, it has one stupidity that currently makes it unusable. Apple has built into the footnotes a 10-12 point line space between each footnote, and there’s absolutely no way to reduce the space. I’ve sent off a complaint to Apple about that.
I really can’t see myself using anything other than a WYSIWYG program. What you describe all sounds so complicated (and I wonder whether everything you describe would work on a Mac).
Why don’t you simply use OpenOffice.org Writer, just by itself without any of the TeX or LaTeX accoutrements?
I have been playing (and working experimentally) with NeoOffice, the beta Mac version of the OpenOffice.org software. I have almost convinced myself to use it with the next book, instead of either Word or InDesign. Its word spacing looks acceptable. Its footnotes are like Word’s. It is a bit cumbersome in some places, but to me it looks like something entirely useable.
—————————
Richard H. Adin wrote:
Ventura has no built-in way to use ligatures. This is a problem of no Unicode support. There are fudges, but none that are perfect. For example, you can control the spacing between characters. It’s crude but it works. I simply don’t bother. The ligatures issue bothers the perfectionist and was one of the “selling points” for Macs in DTP. The truth is that aside from typographers and picky designers, readers are unaware of ligature and nonligature fonts and couldn’t care less. It’s just like feathering to make each page appear as if the type begins and ends at the same points. (Ventura can do this.) With rare exceptions, my clients would rather pay less for the production and not worry about something that their market doesn’t care about, so we don’t feather.
—————————
Ruud Leliveld wrote:
I don’t understand why you are putting all that effort into TeX when there is a (rather cheap) program like Ventura that does almost everything–with much less effort. I think it’s worthwhile to spend some hours with a hardcore Ventura user at the keyboard. In my 20 years of making books, I have never seen another program as complete. It is a pity that, like any other program, Ventura has some bugs, but for most of these we have workarounds.
I myself don’t use ligatures, as doing so is too time consuming and my customers don’t ask for them. And finally, most of the common fonts we use don’t have any ligatures in the character set. However, I found some information about Ventura and ligatures here:
http://www.tramontana.co.hu/ventura/szkript/scripts.html
Some information from this link is copied here:
“Accessing ligatures
“All good Type 1 fonts, including the ones from Bitstream and URW on the installation CD, contain the fi and fl ligatures but they are not mapped to any useable character position in the standard Windows ANSI character set (Unicode applications can use them directly but Ventura cannot). A solution is to physically move these characters into a position which is inside the usual character set.
“LigatureSwapper (length: 62,976 bytes) [link is online] does exactly this: it swaps fi with ordfeminine (Alt-0170) and fl with ordmasculine (Alt-0186). These two characters are used, for instance, in Spanish for indicating ordinal numbers, but they can be reproduced with a superscripted a and o anyway–well, not absolutely correct typographically but unless you need real Spanish, it will do. The program also handles the kerning pairs of these characters correctly.
“For now, you have to forgive the lack of user interface; LigatureSwapper is a simple console program to be run from a Command Prompt. Create a temporary directory, copy all PFB and PFM files to be modified there, start a Command Prompt, and run ligature *.pfb (you can either specify a single filename or use wildcards). The original files will be backed up as .xfb and .xfm and the font files modified. You have to make sure that the .xf? files from a previous run are not there; otherwise, the program will fail. This is not nice, I know, I’ll incorporate it into TouchPFM later with all the usual bells and whistles of a Windows program, I promise, but first I would like to know if it really works on all the various fonts out there.
“Remember that this only makes the character shapes available; it does not provide any assistance inside Ventura. You have to enter the ligatures by hand, using the Alt-numbers or the Insert Symbol dialog, or use search-and-replace to modify existing texts; these characters are not ligatures for Ventura, so neither spell check nor hyphenation will recognize them. So, using ligatures in Ventura is not automatic, but at least it is possible. By the way, you also have to make absolutely sure that every single font you use gets downloaded into the PS or embedded into the PDF.”
—————————
Adam C. Engst wrote:
ReStructured Text sounds a great deal like setext, or structure enhanced text, which we’ve been using since 1992 in TidBITS. Email setext [at symbol] tidbits.com for an auto-reply with more information.
It’s not aimed at the same goal, I don’t think, but is good for displaying ASCII text in a very human-readable fashion while still adhering to a markup language.
—————————
Some other contenders I’ve stumbled across:
Almost Free Text:
http://www.maplefish.com/todd/aft.html
Txt2tags:
http://txt2tags.sourceforge.net/
Terence’s Markup Language:
http://www.antlr.org/TML/index.tml
Deplate and wiki markup:
http://deplate.sourceforge.net/
Aptconvert and Almost Plain Text:
http://www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html
Markdown:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
GutenMark:
http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark/
Simple Document Format:
http://savage.net.au/Ron/html/sdf.html
And there are more. Kind of amazing, really. Well, it is a great idea.
—————————
Many thanks to one and all for these excellent and helpful comments!
_________________________________________
RESOURCES
For more than a year, I’ve been using a note-keeping and writing program called NoteBox Disorganizer:
http://www.geocities.com/goosnargh37/
I no longer do any actual *writing* in Microsoft Word (although I still use it as an editing machine, naturally). Instead, I write in NoteBox Disorganizer, which is tailor-made for quickly jotting down notes and ideas, organizing those notes and ideas, combining selected notes into a document, and exporting that document for publication. It’s truly my favorite writing program, and I’ve tried pretty much everything out there. Here are some of the things that make NoteBox Disorganizer so outstanding:
* Notes are kept in a spreadsheet-like grid that is easy to understand and navigate. And that means all your notes are spread out in plain sight; nothing is hidden away in a database or lost in an outline “tree.”
* It’s possible to name each column, so you can easily categorize your notes under the columns where they belong. Have a note that belongs under more than one category? Clone it! Change a clone, and that change is reflected in all of the others.
* It’s also possible to name each *row,* so you can lay out a book’s structure before you even start writing. Consider:
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Title
Quotation
Story
Discussion
Point A
Point B
Point C
Summary
Conclusion
I routinely use NoteBox Disorganizer to write this newsletter:
2005/03/23 2005/03/16 2005/03/9
Masthead
Feature article
_________________________________________
Readers Write
_________________________________________
Resources
Fine print
If I wanted to export just the feature articles to create a book, I could select them (as a horizontal row), add them to the program’s “Outbox,” and export them as text or an RTF file.
* Use named columns and rows for just *thinking* about things. For example:
NoteBox MS Word Literary Machine
Easy to use? Yes No No
Bounded find? Yes No Yes
Notes in grid? Yes No Limited
Clones? Yes No No
I love the side-by-sideness of all this, which gives me a sense of overview, organization, and control that I don’t get in any other program.
* If you need finer “granularity” in categorizing notes, you can include note ~keywords in the text (and keep an alphabetical list of those ~keywords) and then do a “bounded” search for them. In Boolean terms, that’s an “And” search, which finds notes that include all of the specified ~keywords. Don’t want to fuss with ~keywords? You can still use a bounded search to find notes that contain several terms.
* NoteBox Disorganizer keeps a *running word count* of the text you type, in a single note, in all notes under a category, or in a complete NoteBox file. Fabulous!
* NoteBox Disorganizer can import existing text files, save notes as text files, and even *link to* existing text files (amazing!), so you can use it to organize all those files spread all over your hard drive. Oh, and this works with RTF files, too. That also means you can use the program with files synchronized to your Pocket PC or Palm device! If this interests you, you’ll also want to check out the program’s “NoteBox Exploded” file-saving ability.
* You can use reStructuredText markup (discussed in the previous newsletter), so after you export a document assembled from your notes, you can typeset it with LaTeX or turn it into an HTML document.
The program has much, much more–far too much to cover here–and yet it’s surprisingly easy to use. Just download it and play with it for an hour. You’ll immediately begin to see what it can do for you. I highly recommend it. Oh, and I forgot to mention: NoteBox Disorganizer is free.
http://www.geocities.com/goosnargh37/
_____________________________________________________
THE FINE PRINT
Editorium Update (ISSN 1534-1283) is published by:
The EDITORIUM, LLC
Microsoft Word Add-Ins for Publishing Professionals
http://www.editorium.com
Copyright © 2008 by the Editorium. All rights reserved. Editorium Update and Editorium are trademarks of the Editorium.
You may forward copies of Editorium Update to yourself and others (but not charge for it) and print or store it for your own use. Any other broadcast, publication, retransmission, copying, or storage, without written permission from the Editorium, is prohibited. Send reprint requests to reprints [at symbol] editorium.com
Editorium Update is provided for informational purposes only and without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and freedom from infringement. The user assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and use of this document.
The Editorium is not affiliated with Microsoft Corporation.
_____________________________________________________
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE OR UNSUBSCRIBE
To subscribe, send a blank email message to editorium-subscribe [at symbol] topica.com.
To unsubscribe, send a blank email message to editorium-unsubscribe [at symbol] topica.com.
We do not sell, rent, or give our subscriber list to anyone.
____________________________________________________