Editorium Update

Finding All Unicode Characters

April 20, 2005 – 12:00 pm

Have you ever needed to know what Unicode characters are being used in a Word document? Maybe you need to tag them in some way. Maybe you need to replace them with other characters. Maybe you need to change their font. Whatever the reason, you can find them all with this procedure:

1. Click Edit > Find to display Word’s Find dialog.

2. In the Find What box, enter the following string:

[!^0001-^0255]

3. Click the More button if it’s available.

4. Put a check in the checkbox labeled “Use wildcards.”

5. Click the Find Next button.

Word will find the next Unicode character in your document.

What’s going on here is that the Find string tells Word to find any character whose number is not (!) in the range of 0001 through 0255. By definition, that means any Unicode character, since characters within that range are ANSI characters. Note, however, that some characters may have a value in *both* ranges–em dashes and quotation marks, for example. Seems pretty weird, but perhaps some astute reader will explain this.

If you need to tag the Unicode characters in some way, you can use the basic procedure explained here:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17035255 14

If you want to learn more about Unicode characters, you’ll find additional information here:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17095298 95

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17104210 80

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=17105381 68

You can learn more about using wildcards in my free paper “Advanced Find and Replace in Microsoft Word”:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

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READERS WRITE

William T. Buckley wrote:

There are times when I would like to use the “Callout” feature in Word 2002/SP-3. However, I don’t do that because the resulting callout box *obscures* text rather than simply *displacing* it up/down/left/right. This development is annoying for anyone who has to read the resulting document without seeing the text in its entirety.

So I end up importing the Word document into my publishing application and using its callout feature, which pushes text out of the way so the reader misses nothing. This works just fine. But it also takes two additional steps compared with being able to do the job in native Word: one to open the publisher and import the Word text, and one to create a .pdf file of the finished piece so it can be shared with those who lack the native publishing application.

There is a second Word option for callout placement, which is to set up the base page with a very wide right margin. Then put either a callout or a “frame and arrow” combination in the blank space beyond the right margin which has no text to obscure. But these measures seem artificial and counterintuitive.

Which leads to my question: Short of extreme measures such as loading the text into a 2-column Word table, with text in the left column and callouts in the right column, is there a way to set up Word so that its callouts do not hide the text over which they are positioned?

I responded:

Have you tried this?

1. Right-click the border of the callout box.

2. Click Format AutoShape.

3. Click the Layout tab.

4. Click the box labeled “Inline with text.”

Bill replied that that worked but needed a slight adjustment:

I checked it out and found that what actually worked best for my purposes was not the “In line with text” option, because that seemed to eat up too much space on the page. Instead, I poked around and tried the “Tight” setting, with alignment right. This placed the box at the right margin with the text flowing around in fairly close proximity, so not too much space was consumed. I then customized the appearance of the box and arrow. Very neat.

Thanks, Bill!

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RESOURCES

So, you think you know how to spell.

Try this spelling test from Mindy McAdams:

http://www.sentex.net/~mmcadams/spelling.html

And, if you dare, let me know how you did.

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THE FINE PRINT

Editorium Update (ISSN 1534-1283) is published by:

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