Archive for the ‘Editing’ Category
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
I've been working on a really big set of really big books that use odd, archaic spellings. Wanting to modernize those spellings, I decided to create a macro that would list every word that Microsoft Word sees as misspelled. You'll find the macro a little farther down, but before using ...
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Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
Back in January 2003 I published an article called "WordPerfect Weirdness," which featured a macro for converting "special" characters (dashes, quotation marks, and the like) in a file imported from WordPerfect to Word. You can read the article here: Share
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Friday, February 24th, 2006
When I was in first grade, a magician came to our school, and I've been interested in magic ever since. One thing I've learned is that magic is largely psychological; it depends heavily on what magicians call "misdirection"--getting the audience to look at or think about something that furthers the ...
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Thursday, November 10th, 2005
Remember WordPerfect, with its cardboard template that showed which function keys did what? I liked it; you can tell because I created similar templates for my Editor's ToolKit and DEXter programs: Share
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Thursday, October 27th, 2005
In trying to explain how Word's Find and Replace (FnR) wildcard mechanism works, I'll also present a practical solution to the multitude of problems encountered by the seemingly innocuous ^p^p to ^p, whose usual objective is to remove unnecessary blank lines. In doing so, we shall traverse the width of ...
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Friday, September 16th, 2005
I'm a book editor by day and a writer and programmer by night, which means I have dozens of projects going at any one time, and numerous tasks for each project. I've been looking for a way to manage all that and have finally figured out a system (using Microsoft ...
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Thursday, September 1st, 2005
In our last issue, I wrote about increasing editorial efficiency by fixing one kind of problem at a time. This raises (*not* "begs") the question, "What kinds of problems lend themselves to this approach?" Some possibilities for your consideration: Share
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Friday, August 19th, 2005
Back in the days of working on paper, editors had to keep an eye out for all kinds of errors and problems--all at the same time. The human brain, which is wired to think about *one* thing at a time, often missed things, and editors were forced to comb through ...
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Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
A book I recently edited had lots of lists--with no terminal punctuation. The lists looked something like this: Share
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
In earlier versions of Microsoft Word, it was possible to print comments separately from tracked revisions. You can still do that with Word 2002 and later versions, but how to do so is no longer obvious. Here's the trick: Share
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