The degree symbol is used for angles and arcs, temperatures, and the ‘proof’ of alcohol, among other things. You’ll even find it in harmonics. It started as a raised glyph of the digit 0, but best practice in typesetting and design now is to use a true degree symbol designed for the purpose.
The degree symbol is preferred because many fonts style the alternatives in ways that make them look very out of place as a degree symbol.
A non-breaking space has intentional and side benefits:
You don’t have to rely on your eyes alone. In the Find field, type ^s to search for non-breaking spaces. You can even pair this code with wildcards to quickly add non-breaking spaces between all digits and their units of measure, or in place of simple spaces in long numbers.
Compositors and others on the design team can use the non-breaking space as a placeholder for another character, often the thin space which Word cannot produce but which makes for elegant text design.
On a Mac: opt + spacebar
In Windows: ctrl + shift + spacebar
It’s not just plagiarism that makes an editor look for text copied from elsewhere. The non-breaking spaces in such pasted content can really mess up layout. I see these a lot in article titles in the bibliography or reference list. By changing those to regular spaces, we can save a lot of fixing in page proofs.
To show or hide these spaces and all non-printing characters, click the ¶ icon on the home ribbon.
A non-breaking space sometimes goes by the name of a fixed space or a hard space.
Whether you need a word count for estimation or billing purposes, or for something else entirely, MS Word comes to the rescue. There are two easy ways to get text from a PDF into Word:
Pasting text into Word is simplest, but it doesn’t work with every file type. To get the whole contents of a slide set, for example, first print the slides to PDF, then copy all from that new file.
Open Word, then tell it to open the PDF. Word will convert the PDF and the Word count will appear along the bottom edge of the screen.
It may take a few seconds for Word to do its count; just wait. If it seems stalled, scroll down a few pages or go right to the end.
Word can make all kinds of errors detecting the text in a PDF, especially if that PDF was a scan rather than a “print” of an original file. (Misread ligatures and insert spaces mid-word.) Word will also include all of the markups and notes made to the PDF, and if those notes overlap text, that text will be excluded. Body text from a marked-up PDF is best gotten into Word by the copy–paste method.
This captures the running feet and heads too. If the word count needs to be precise, do a search-and-destroy for those.
Yes, you can export a slide set as an RTF, but we’re talking PDFs here.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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Right on the Home ribbon in MS Word you’ll find a Sort button. It’s handy for alphabetizing, to be sure, but you can use this as a hack to find duplicates in a bibliography too.
Some bibliographic styles list references in the order they are mentioned within the body of the text. This means they’re in 1, 2, 3 order rather than alphabetized by author name. Especially when a text is team written, duplicate entries can happen, and they’re hard to find when the bib or refs list is long.
Sort, to the rescue! With a couple steps, first. Watch the demo video or follow the 3 easy steps below.
This sort trick can also help you spot small inconsistencies in author names, such as Department for defence vs Department of defence.
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Has your writer used all uppercase letters “for legibility”? Did they use them liberally for emphasis? Fix it all with a click (or 3):
They look nice, and some would say they facilitate reading ease. But curly quotes can cause snafus with macros, wildcards, and content management systems (CMS) like online education interfaces and website back ends. And sometimes Word just doesn’t want to create a mark with the right curl. Here’s how to fix those snags.
If your quotes (or apostrophes) are simply facing the wrong way, the easiest thing to do is type a second mark beside it then erase the wrong one. Or, use one of the keyboard shortcuts listed in the table below. Alt codes work on both operating systems but Mac users may have to turn on the alt codes (or even the unicode) keyboard first. Windows users should type the first two keys together, then press the keys that follow the comma.
| Alt Code | Mac | Windows | ||
| ‘ | opening single quote | alt + 0145 | opt + ] | ‘ |
| ’ | closing single quote | alt + 0146 | opt + shift + ] | ctrl + ‘, ‘ |
| “ | opening double quote | alt + 0147 | opt + [ | shift + “ |
| ” | closing double quote | alt + 0148 | opt + shift + [ | ctrl + ‘, shift + “ |
If your find and replace string isn’t working, or it is royally messing up the manuscript, try replacing all the curly quotation marks with straight ones before you run the F&R. Then change them back.
You can read about how to easily change them in this other post.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!
The book and its tutorial videos go into options for seeing Tracked Changes in quite a bit of detail, so here we’ll just compare seeing changes in balloons vs seeing them inline. We’re also sticking with the defaults for colour, underlining, etc. though it’s almost all customizable. Except for specifying which reviewer is shown in which colour; that’s impossible.
Continue reading Track Changes Inline or in BalloonsEditors sometimes use highlighting in MS Word to flag content. My publisher clients have asked me to highlight design and production instructions within the text, and I use highlighting to flag item for fact checking or a second look. (Design instructions include things like [table near here] and [note this is a mu symbol].)
Therefore, one of my final checks on a file is to review all the highlighting. Word makes this easy, using the Advanced Find and Replace to skip through all instances of highlighting.
Continue reading How to Find Highlighting
Not nearly as flavourful as that paste we ate in preschool, but maybe more useful, Word has several options for you to paste content with. Get at the the options from the ribbon. Just click the little down arrow beside the Paste button on the left end of the Home ribbon to see the options.
Here’s how they’re useful:
Continue reading Paste Options in Word 365They got rid of Clippy but not many of the other annoying automated features in MS Word. Automatic formatting is something that most editors want to turn off before they work. In fact, this is why turning off most automation is covered in the “Get Ready to Edit” section of the book.
When you get a document in which all of the URLs (web addresses) are blue and underlined, and active (hyperlinked), you’ll most likely want to remove them so they don’t cause design problems or (horrors!) end up in print. You can do this one at a time, or in one fell swoop (globally).
Continue reading Quick Trick to Remove Hyperlinks
