Archives for February 13, 2012

[Originally Appeared 1999.]

Also, many of you corrected my statement in Word of Law No. 12 about the spacing Word inserts after a period or stop. Several pointed out that in both mono and proportionally spaced type, the spacing is the same as a word space. There should be some extra spacing, such as the space occupied by an “n-dash.” An n-dash is longer than a single space.

The various teams at Microsoft differ in their approach. The text that the newsletter wizard includes in the sample templates uses single spaces after periods. A fun way to generate sample text for testing and demonstration purposes (mention in WOW previously) is to type “=rand(2,2)” in an empty paragraph, then press the ENTER key. Word will produce the following text:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Word automatically inserted two spaces after the periods. The (2,2) in the command above can be replaced by other numbers, where the first is the number of paragraphs and the second is the number of sentences in each paragraph. There are limits, but I have not tested them.

Following Microsoft’s lead, perhaps this issue is best left as “we agree to disagree.”

This 1999 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.

[Originally appeared 1999.]

The e-mail in the brief time since last week’s column brought some additional uses for empty paragraphs and a suggestion for another “law.” Several users noted the use of empty paragraphs to separate adjacent tables, or to separate tables from surrounding text. Another pointed out that authors of e-mail messages who use Word as a text editor may need empty paragraphs to make plain text messages legible.

The law: Avoid extra tabs, especially in columnar presentations. For effective and reliable formatting of columnar material, each column should be separated by a single tab. This rule applies to simple columns of information. Any presentation with enough columns or complexity should be formatted with a table.

Don’t forget the benefits of styles for this formatting. The tab settings for those columns can and should be incorporated in a style named for the number or type of columns. Then if the formatting must shift, a change of the format of the style will change all of the entries.

The writer who suggested this law complained that time and again he received documents that included only default tabs, with as many as necessary to separate the columns.

There is a deeper issue here. Not a law, but a motto: Typing, get over it!

The standards and habits of the era of mechanical typing have been very hard to stamp out, even after nearly more than 20 years of word processing. When one had to change tabs settings mechanically, it was possible, but not practical, to change settings for special parts of a document. Typists left their tabs one half inch (or the metric equivalent) apart, and tabbed repeatedly. Many, perhaps most, still do.

In the era of non proportional fonts, typists were taught to type two spaces after a period. All word processing programs have been designed to include extra space automatically in proportionally spaced fonts. Type one space. After years of preaching this rule to enormous resistance, I can cite as authority Rule 2.1.4 of Robert Bringhurst’s elegant book, “The Elements of Typographical Style.” http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063

If only we could learn to present the documents of law practice and other organizations with the clarity, beauty and love of print he offers.

This 1999 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/

[Originally appeared 1999.]

This week’s column will be a brief excursion to Laws of Styles #6, originally stated in Word of Law No. 1. The rule was brief enough, “Use no empty paragraphs.”

Please do not read this and the other “laws” as absolute, unbreakable rules. In the real world, a code of law must be interpreted and adapted. The Laws of Styles were intended to be broad, brief and a bit provocative.

The absence of empty paragraphs helps assure consistency of formatting, and allows formatting to be transformed accurately. There are, however, several circumstances where it is neither practical, nor appropriate to avoid them completely. It takes enormous discipline, for instance, to avoid using empty paragraphs to separate the closing line of a letter from the author’s name, or similar spacing in other types of signature blocks.

A “pure” approach would create the space by setting the Space After setting of the Closing Line paragraph style to a large enough number to open up the space. Even so, there may be good reasons to leave an empty paragraph mark. David Kiefer was kind enough to point out that such empty paragraphs may be used by programs such as RightFax for signature codes.

In planning a template for use with macros, empty paragraphs may be necessary or desirable to assure that text gets inserted in the proper place and style. Document assembly tools such as Matthew Bender/Capsoft’s HotDocs use empty paragraphs liberally as part of their template coding pattern. During the macro or assembly process, all or nearly all of the empty paragraphs should disappear or be filled.

So, our amended/corrected/interpreted rule/guide/suggestion could be, “Use very few empty paragraphs in finished documents.” No one would ever remember it. Let’s keep calling these rules “laws,” and keep up the discussion to learn how to use them well.

This 1999 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.

[Originally appeared 1999.]

Last week’s column started out with the simple mission of explaining how to restart paragraph numbering, but left us on the connection between customization of numbering settings and the Windows registry.

Before diving back into the behavior and misbehavior of Word, it helps to restate the business goals for automatic numbering. An organization should be able to publish to its users a set of standard numbering alternatives. The numbering patterns should be linked to a set of styles, generally Heading 1 through Heading 9. Users should be able to apply the numbering patterns consistently throughout the organization, regardless of the computer on which the numbering has been applied.

Further, users should be able to restart numbering within a document, and keep the style application correct. If a document contains one or more numbering restarts, and a different numbering pattern needs to be applied, the document should not lose the numbering restart.

Several of you have written asking whether we could just state some easy advice on proper and accurate use of automatic numbering in Word 97 and Word 2000. An answer (not the only answer), separates numbering application from numbering design and customization. For numbering application, an organization’s experts should prepare a series of templates that contain only the appropriate numbering patterns, linked to styles that have been formatted correctly. General users can apply numbering patterns and related style settings by selecting one of these templates in the Style Gallery. Numbering restart requires some care, probably best supported by a macro. In any case, general users should stay away from use of the Bullets and Numbering dialog’s Outline Numbered tab. There needs to be a troubleshooting guide to deal with difficulties, especially from sharing work with those who haven’t mastered these rules.

Once again, this column won’t finish the subject. The final answer will remain the one in the previous paragraph. We hope the detailed explanation with help explain and justify the advice.

Returning to the perspective of the expert user or developer and the customization of an outline numbered pattern, we must now deal directly with the Bullets and Numbering dialog’s Outline Numbered tab. I have sometimes called this dialog the ListGallery after the name of the Word object with which the dialog is associated. The tab displays 8 windows, of which the upper left one always indicates “None.” The other seven windows display a portion of the settings and formatting for numbering derived from a group of presets stored in the individual user’s Windows Registry. For the curious, in Word 97 they are stored at HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Word\List Gallery Presets. For Word 2000, the setting is the same, except that 8.0 is replaced by 9.0. Don’t get too excited. The registry entries are a string of digits, not easily decipherable.

There are some oddities (a polite euphemism) in the display of the Outline Numbered dialog. The appearance of the windows depends on the paragraph in the cursor is located. If the windows remain or have been reset to their default values and the cursor is not in a numbered paragraph linked to a style, then the windows in the top row will not have numbering levels linked to styles, but the windows in the bottom level will. If the cursor is in a paragraph at a heading numbering level lower than 1 (say level 4), then all the levels in the windows in the Outline Numbered dialog will appear in the order Current Level (here level 4), Level 1 and Level 2. In the same document, putting the cursor in a paragraph without numbering caused the two windows in the lower right corner of the Outline Numbered dialog to lose their connection to the linked styles.

I could go on, but let’s consider at least some of what happens with the use of the customize function launched from the Outline Numbered dialog.

In the terms described in the column in issue 4.29, drawing strongly on the Word object model, the Customize Outline Numbered List dialog allows users to control nearly all of the properties of the List Levels associated with the ListTemplate assigned to the active window of the ListGallery from which the customize dialog was launched. One can demonstrate this by recording a macro in which such a customization is performed. Take a look at the macro. About four pages of VBA code shows up. Changing any characteristic of any outline level causes Word to rewrite all of the properties of all of the ListLevels associated with the ListTemplate assigned to that gallery position. The built-in programming (but not the dialog (!) can reset the TabPosition property (the Jason Tab behavior). At the end of the macro, Word applies that ListTemplate to the List in which the current paragraph is included.

Feel free to reread the last paragraph a few times. It isn’t easy.

Any time a user changes number formatting through the Customize Outline Numbered List dialog, they rewrite the settings for the connected Window of the ListGallery. This rewriting occurs in the Windows registry for that machine. The application of the revised ListTemplate to the list in the document causes the document to pick up the new settings. This may work properly in a pure single user setting, with a simple document. If there is only one List in the document (no paragraph numbering restarts, among other things), then the new settings can apply correctly. Trouble starts brewing quickly if a user tries to customize numbering settings from work produced by another. If they have previously customized their Outline Numbered settings, it may differ from the organization’s standards, and “corrupt” the document.

All of this behavior helps explain the urgency of the development of numbering formats by those who have mastered these issues, and sharing them through templates and the Style Gallery.

This 1999 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.