abbo@tank.uchicago.edu (Laurie Abbott) (10/20/89)
A ms. that was begun as just a "clean copy" in MSWord 1.0 on an SE ended up being camera-ready copy 2 years later in Word 4.0. The bulk of the ms. had to be hard-paged because there was English on one side and Ottoman Turkish on the other, and the end-of-page for Turkish and translation had to match exactly (435 pages). The big problem happened in the upgrade from Word 3.02 to Word 4.0; somehow the pages (no appreciable editing) didn't come out the same length. Not every page was off, but maybe one out of 10 had a line or two over. What a nightmare. The Turkish was in one set of files (paged on even pages) and the English translation was in another set (paged odd). E.J. Brill had given me *very* specific parameters for page/text length. There wasn't much leeway. My only alternative, short of redoing the entire document in PageMaker (money) or repaginating the whole thing in Word (time) was to attempt to adjust the spacing between the words on those pages that bled over. I condensed a(n unjustified) space to 1.5 pts, and then tried replacing the spaces in a paragraph, sometimes several, with the condensed space. Rejustified. The right margin was a mess. Going backwards, I discovered that even *one* condensed space in Word 4.0 totally screwed up the right justification. What gives? Why was there a difference in page length for the *same* text (maybe a corrected spelling here and there, no actual text changes) on the *same* SE from Word 3.02 to Word 4.0? And why does condensing text affect right justification? On the same note, why doesn't Word support the Apple Script Manager, so that those of us who *want* a decent wp for non-Latin script aren't flumoxed by this same fractional width problem? The ms. is in the hands of the publisher now, but I'll *never* attempt another project that size in MSWord. I've been a Word user on Mac since the first week after it was released, but just giving us tables and macros *ain't* enough, guys. -- abbabbo@uchimvs1.bitnet | Bitnet abbo@tank.uchicago.edu | Internet ...!unnet!mimsy!oddjob!tank!abbo | uucp
frank@mnetor.UUCP (Frank Kolnick) (10/20/89)
In article <5912@tank.uchicago.edu> abbo@tank.uchicago.edu (Laurie Abbott) writes: >... And why does >condensing text affect right justification? ... I can't answer that question, but condensed text isn't the only thing that confuses Word. Italics and other styles often seem to. Other than screwing up the margins, Word also forgets where the cursor is. I often have to put the cursor three or four characters *after* the place I want to edit! This may all be part of the same problem, and its annoying. Maybe in 4.1? As a general response, though, Word is far from being a page layout program, primarily because it provides very little control over *pages*. I only use it for drafts or very simple technical manuals. -- Frank Kolnick, consulting for, and therefore expressing opinions independent of, Computer X UUCP: {allegra, linus}!utzoo!mnetor!frank