Tips for Publishing Professionals Using Microsoft Word (www.editorium.com)
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:
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 Word’s pitfalls that never fail to trip up a traveller.
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 Outlook) that seems to work. Hoping others might find my system useful, I decided to pass it on in this newsletter. Here’s the procedure (which is not as complicated as it looks with all this explanation):
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:
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 a manuscript over and over again. They also needed to keep style sheets (still a useful practice) to recall earlier decisions. Changing one’s mind could have disastrous consequences; it often meant having to re-read the manuscript, unmaking previous decisions and implementing new ones.
A book I recently edited had lots of lists–with no terminal punctuation. The lists looked something like this:
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:
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:
In our shop, typesetters like to see a sheet of paper showing the page layout for a book they are about to typeset. This saves them from having to guess the location and pagination the editor has in mind for an epigraph, dedication, preface, introduction, and so on. For years our editors created page layouts by hand, drawing little boxes and writing in their instructions. The drawings looked something like this:
Microsoft Word includes the ability to display line numbers in a document, as explained in last week’s newsletter. Unfortunately, it *doesn’t* include the ability to display paragraph numbers. And if you need to display paragraph numbers, that’s a problem. So, here’s a macro that will add a number, formatted as red and hidden, at the beginning of each paragraph: