Editors who use Microsoft Word’s revision-tracking feature in documents with footnotes (or endnotes) have often complained of an annoyance: If you delete a note (which you should do only by deleting the reference mark in the text), the reference mark is struck out, but the text of the note itself is not struck out. This can be really confusing to clients who want to review your work:

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I’ve been writing a lot of macros for indexing lately, and if you ever need to rework a previously created index, you’ll be interested in my latest creation, IndexDeconstructor:

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I’m pleased to announce the release of DEXembed, a Microsoft Word add-in created specifically to meet the needs of indexers who use standalone indexing programs (such as SKY Index, CINDEX, or MACREX), and who need to embed index tags in Microsoft Word documents or DocBook XML:

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Out of the box, Microsoft Word is set up for the most generic of users–someone who needs to type an occasional letter or compose a memo for the boss. It works well for such purposes, offering lots of automated corrections and formatting for someone who doesn’t want to think about such things. But for people who work in the publishing industry, Word needs considerable tweaking. For one thing, if you’re editing, typesetting, or indexing in Word, you don’t *want* all that automated stuff; you want *control.* No automatically capitalizing the first word of a sentence, for example, or setting the ends of ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) as superscript.

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I’m happy to announce the release of ScrIndex, a new program that will be of interest to indexers, editors, and publishers whose projects cite various books of scripture:

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In the publishing house where I used to work, we experimented with what I call “paperless proofreading.” A previous newsletter explains the concept:

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While editing in Word, you may use Word’s Comments feature (Insert > Comment) to insert questions for your client–or possibly your client has used comments to insert questions for you. In either case, there will probably come a time when you need to remove the comments so the file can be used for typesetting. But deleting comments one at a time can be a real pain.

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Bookmarks in a Word document are useful for many things, such as, well, marking your place, marking ranges for index entries, and marking text for cross-references. But they can also get in the way–for example, if you’ve finished editing a document for a client and have several dozen bookmarks you’ve created but now need to delete, or if you’re getting ready to import a Word document into QuarkXPress or InDesign, which don’t like bookmarks.

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Okay, I admit it: I’m a software junkie. I sometimes spend hours finding, downloading, and playing with new programs that I think might increase my productivity. Here are a few of my recent finds:

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If you’ve spent much time in user groups related to Microsoft Word, Macintosh computers, or technical writing, you’ve probably seen postings and articles by Geoff Hart, one of the most prolific, respected, and helpful writers and Word experts I know. And now for the big news: Geoff has released his long-awaited book Effective Onscreen Editing! You can learn more about the book here:

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