johnson@su-russell.UUCP (05/27/87)
.... Here are some tricks I've learnt while trying to get Word 3.0 to handle my thesis. These are kind of hacky and the first is quite uncomfortable, but at least you can get the job done. If there are two footnotes on a page immediately before a page that begins with with a large ``Keep Together'' style paragraph, the last footnote may disappear. To get it back, manually insert a page break BEFORE the large ``Keep Together'' style paragraph (you will have to take it out if you change the page layout, of course). The overstrike formula constructor \O(e1,e2,e3, ..), where e1, e2, e3 are the expressions to be overwritten, sometimes fails to line up e1 with the other expressions. To get around this bug, make e1 a single blank space, e.g. instead of \O(=,/) use \O( ,=,/) . Finally, I have written a little Desk Accessory to do automatic equation numbering and referencing in MS Word, using the PrintMerge facility. It works like this: First, you copy your entire document into the clipboard, then you start up the DA. It looks for a TEXT type scrap, and looks for all occurances of printmerge field references of the form <<eNAME>> where NAME can be any alphanumeric string (without blanks). It returns a clipboard which contains a list of PrintMerge statements of the form: <<SET eNAME1 = 1 <<SET eNAME2 = 2 ... where eNAME1 is the first equation name it came accross, eNAME2 is the second, and so on. You paste this into the top of your document. Its use relies on the fact that PrintMerge does not pay attention to embedded blacks in field names. So you can use field names with embedded blanks in them for both forward and backward references to an equation, as in the following example: `` The main equation is (<<emain >>), but the tricky part is in the auxiliary definition (<<eaux2 >>). SOME COMPLICATED EQN (<<emain>>) SOME MORE STUFF (<<eaux1>>) AUXILARY DEFN (<<eaux2>>) It is simple to see that (<<eaux1 >>) might be modified as ...'' This technique works quite well, and handles up to 128 equations per document (there is a limit of 128 different fields, not 256 as in the Word documentation). The DA is about 5 mins programming... Mark Johnson Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University